


it dies (a million little times)

by safeandsound13



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Best Friends, Childhood Friends, F/M, First Time, Love Triangle, Mutual Pining, Pining, Secret Relationship, Semi-Public Sex, Smut, but its actually a love v like god intended
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:42:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 64,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28700883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/safeandsound13/pseuds/safeandsound13
Summary: When Wells, Bellamy and Clarke make a pact to lose their virginity before New Year's, Clarke doesn't expect to be the last one standing. Bellamy is willing to help her out, but it ends up unravelling nearly a decade of friendships.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 309
Kudos: 371





	1. where the spirit meets the bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arysa13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arysa13/gifts).



> this is a very belated birthday present for miss emily. now, she didnt ask for much (best friends, pining, sexy), but i know she doesn't like fics above 10k. problem is, i dont know how to be concise and they weren't even boning when the maximum word count started to come into view. so i split this into two parts, so emily can call it a day after this one and roll with the ambigious ending, or if she wants some more pining/yearning/angst, she can click right back in whenever she pleases to do so. yes i live to serve her.
> 
> i repeat: to my musical soulmate, the kinkiest queen of them all, em. my ol’ cobber. my favorite drongo. quite the spunk you are. you’re a classic. and you live in the worst possible timezone imaginable. hope you enjoy this, and if you don't, lie. lie like someone is pointblank asking you if you *** *** ************.

┇

_part i: where the spirit meets the bones_

┇

It all started with a pact. Famous last words and all. 

Clarke met Wells first. Or well, she is aware at one point in life she probably didn’t know Wells, she just doesn’t actually remember. In even her earliest memories, he’s always there. Her mom and his dad were college friends, settled in the same gated community neighbourhood and decided to have children at virtually the exact same moment. 

One month after she was born, so was Wells, and they had been attached at the hip since they learned how to walk. They shared their lunch in kindergarten so he could have more fruit and she could have a double dose of goldfish crackers, they joined the same tennis club at eight, and after watching the Princess Bride together obsessively for an entire summer their first year of being teens, he was her first kiss — just to try and see what all the fuss was about. Her hair got stuck in his braces, and the angle was so awkward and forced they never managed to get it right without their noses bumping. 

Bellamy didn’t come into the picture until much later, around the time they were thirteen. His mom had been sick for a while, _really_ sick, before eventually dying, leaving him and his sister orphans. Wells’ dad took them in, the first few years fostering, and ultimately adopting them. 

She got off on the wrong foot with him, in the beginning. Clarke realized she didn’t actually know how to make friends since she never had to — she had Wells after all — and in hindsight Bellamy seemed to blame her for a lot of things she had no power over just to make some sense of this new life he’d been thrown into, his old one completely uprooted and his mom’s death still a fresh, gaping wound. 

After three months, Thelonious finally got Bellamy to join an afterschool club instead of just being glued to Octavia’s side, convincing him with promises to personally watch his sister, that she would be fine in the single hour longer than usual it would keep him away from home. He picked their school’s Myths and Legends club, because he’s always been a nerd, even back then, and for the first time since living with the Jahas actually seemed excited about something. His very first meeting and a nine year old Octavia, always a flair for the dramatics and probably in the middle of processing through some serious abandonment issues, ran away. Wells found her in a tree in the woods behind his house, and Clarke was the one who broke her arm climbing it to get her out. 

Bellamy held her hand the entire time they waited for the ambulance while Wells tried to tell her a stupid story about his chess master nemesis to distract her from the pain, and ever since that moment, the three of them were inseparable. Bellamy taught her how to drive stick after a year of her refusing to get a license because of her dad, and Wells kept trying to teach him chess even though Bellamy wasn’t interested in the slightest, and the two of them made it their hobby to become pretentious movie snobs who shared deep thoughts about Fight Club while making their way through some Top 100 IMDb list, and when Bellamy and Wells both joined the basketball team in high school Clarke would come to all their games for the snacks.

Naturally, this was always going to stop being their normal. They were always going to go their separate ways for college. Clarke is going to do pre-med at her father’s alma mater, Wells got a full scholarship to an Ivy League on the other side of the country, and Bellamy picked a community college in their hometown so he could be near Octavia. Not that he said it in so many words, because Thelonious would never in a million years accept that, but Clarke knew. 

Their last day of summer, strangely enough the subject comes up. The two boys were sitting on the ledge of Bellamy’s beat up truck he paid for with two summers of long hours at the auto shop, Clarke sprawled out on her back on the bed of the truck, trying to spot the constellations her dad taught her about as a little girl. 

The two of them were talking about Bond Girls, and then Halle Berry comes up, and then Bellamy says something along the lines of, “Please. I would kill for her to take my v-card.”

“Wait,” Wells seems surprised, at the very least telling Clarke they never discussed any of this in private either. It’s just not something that ever came up naturally, and she’s never really had the inclination to ask. She figured they might have though, bros being bros. “You and Gina never…?”

The girlfriend he had all through their junior year. Curly hair, glowing skin, better at playing Call of Duty than the three of them combined. Offered Clarke her first alcopop at a college party Bellamy took them to. She was a senior, and they broke it off in the summer before she left for college.

“No,” Bellamy answers, reluctant. “We did other stuff but—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head at Wells’ smug expression as he digs his elbow into the other guy’s ribs, jostling him. “You know what, keep the judgment out of your tone, I’ve seen your socks. Those should be a health hazard.”

Clarke lets out a choked strangle, scrunching up her nose at the sky. More info than she needed, to be honest. She doesn’t want to know what her oldest friend in the world gets up to under the covers, no matter how close they are.

“Shut up,” Wells shoves him right back, knocking into him with his shoulder, sounding embarrassed. “Like you’re not intimately accustomed with your left hand.”

“Jesus, the both of us? This is pathetic.” She can feel his eyes on her, and when she looks up, she sees him watching her from over his shoulder. “Even you, princess?”

“Especially me.” Clarke pushes herself up onto her elbows, both of her eyebrows raising, the bottom of her hair tickling her back. She thinks of her sparse opportunities over the years. She’s sure she could’ve made it work, if she really wanted to, but somehow always hanging out with the two of them seemed to be an easy enough repellent. Those who tried anyway, well. They weren’t what she wanted. “I spent all of high school trembling if Niylah even so much as looked at me.”

“Damn,” he curses, voice rough as he shakes his head with disappointment. She doesn’t know why Bellamy thought that out of the three of them she would be the one to uphold their honor. How could she have? He spent most of the parties they went to glaring at anyone who even dared to look in her direction. 

“I don’t get what the big deal is. It’s just sex,” Clarke declares, lifting her shoulders nonchantly. It’s natural, like learning to walk, getting your period, or having to file taxes. It happens. 

“Right?” Bellamy agrees, adjusting so his back is against the side of the bed, stretching out his legs, Wells mirroring him on the opposite end. He sighs heavily, rubbing the back of his neck with a world weary look in his eyes. “If it was up to me I would’ve gotten it over with already, believe me.”

Wells tacks on an agreeing hum, and then Clarke is sitting up, resting her hands on the calves of her criss-crossed legs. She wishes she could blame it on the haze of grief she was in for most of high school, being scared or nerve-wracked, or not feeling _ready_ or whatever, but she can’t. She _would_ like to see what the big deal is about. Her pensive gaze flickers over to her shoelaces, then back up to Wells, then lingering on Bellamy, her teeth sinking into her lower lip. “We should make a pact.”

“I am not fucking Bellamy,” Wells immediately pipes up, causing the other guy to kick him in the shin with not much tact. 

He snorts, humoured. “I should be offended you singled me out.”

Wells brows pucker, scoffing indignantly. “Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking it.”

“You wouldn’t be my first choice but I would definitely fuck you, Jaha,” Bellamy answers with a smug smirk, enough to press Wells’ buttons to the point where she’s sure that if he _could_ blush, his moon-washed skin would be covered in an embarrassed flush.

“Not that kind of pact,” Clarke clarifies, cutting them off with an eye roll before it turns into a badly titled joke-porno about step-brothers and the slutty girl next door. “I mean, we should all lose our virginity before the end of the year. The pact could be an incentive.”

“No more excuses,” Bellamy adds, reading her mind, intrigued eyes on her as his elbows lean on the side panel of his truck. She can hardly make out the familiar brown of his eyes from over here, in the dark.

“I don’t know,” Wells starts, obviously uneasy, always the voice of reason between the three of them, but Bellamy nudges his foot with his hand, egging him on, “Come on, live a little, dude.”

“Yeah,” Clarke teases, corners of her mouth quirking up. “Don’t tell me you’re waiting for marriage.”

“Fine,” he concedes, displeased, rolling his eyes as the other guy loudly and not entirely unsarcastically cheers him on until Wells is stifling an amused grin. 

“Good,” she approves over the commotion, laying back down with her hands folded over her stomach. She thinks she spots the Little Bear. “This should be fun.”

“Fun?” Bellamy echoes, then obviously talking to Wells as a conspiratorial tone seeps through his gruff voice, “I think she’s broken.”

She doesn’t even bother to give him the satisfaction of making her sit up to glare at him, and instead just follows up with the always classy, “Go fuck yourself, Bellamy.”

“Now that would defeat the purpose of the pact we just made.”

┇

Of course, it was never a fair fight. Bellamy loses his virginity to not one, but _two_ girls in his first week there. The first few months, Clarke at least has the comfort of knowing Wells is struggling too. He doesn’t seem to have much luck in the dating department, although she definitely suspects it’s for a complete lack of trying. He’s hot, really well-read, and the kindest guy she’s ever met which obviously makes him a catch. 

Clarke tries. She puts herself out there, lets her roommate drag her to parties she doesn’t want to go to and makes an effort to join a few clubs. She dates a guy named Finn from her Science class, and there’s a lot of under the clothes fumbling and wet make-out sessions, but he turns out to not only be a loser, but also a loser with a long distance girlfriend. It lasts ten miserable days total, and by the time she nears the end of it, she’s actually glad she dodged that particular bullet. 

Halfway through October, she meets Lexa. She’s this cool, older senior majoring in Poli-Sci who wears lots of eye make-up and has even more opinions about things Clarke’s never even heard about like misogynoir and SWERFs and technolibertarianism. She has long brown hair and the prettiest green eyes. Lexa doesn’t smile often, but God, when she does — Clarke finds she _wants_ it to be her. 

She gets close, too. 

Her roommate Josie is out for a ‘meeting’ with her TA at nine p.m. on a Tuesday, which means that for the first time in months, she has the dorm to herself. She and Lexa were supposed to go to one of the seventeen pre-Halloween parties at one of the sororities on campus, but instead they are on Clarke’s small bed, tangled together, well on their way to second base. 

Lexa is kissing down her neck. soothing bite marks with soft lips, busy pulling her shirt from the waistband of her skirt when Clarke’s phone rings. Blindly, she reaches for it in the drawer of her nightstand, simultaneously sliding her halo headband back in place with her other, all intention to just silence it. 

She sighs when she makes out the caller ID through squinted eyes, squeezing her girlfriend’s bicep to signal her to lift off her. Finn again. Lexa blinks at her curiously, unlatching her mouth from her collarbone before leaning away from her back onto her heels. Her face is unreadable, as is her tone, hands that were just exploring her body now limply resting over the top of her thighs. “I thought he was a mistake.”

“He was,” Clarke agrees, absentmindedly, taking a screenshot of her missed call logs and sending it to her groupchat with Bellamy and Wells. She has to roll over onto her stomach to not pull her near-dead phone from the charger, the wire entirely too short. The tip of her thumbnail disappears in between her teeth as she mindlessly scrolls through her other missed notifications, but it’s not long before her phone buzzes with a reply.

Bellamy (09:29 pm): _bro needs to learn asking eleven times is the same as begging_

She smiles to herself, shooting back a quick GIF. Lexa abruptly gets up from the bed, running a hand through her long hair after adjusting her jean shirt. She reaches for the red bandana that goes with her Rosie the Riveter costume on Josie’s dresser, the first time Clarke’s actually seen her wear a color that wasn’t black. “I should go.”

“Wait, what?” Clarke frowns, tearing her eyes off her phone. She locks it, sitting up and swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, ignoring the tiny pulse of lingering want between her thighs that comes with the movement. Her halo’s knocked askew again in her haste, but she doesn’t bother fixing it. “Why?”

“I misinterpreted,” she announces flatly, a little dent above her eyebrow as she refuses to make eye-contact, crouching down to collect her backpack from the floor, pulling her jacket from it. “I don’t mind you are attracted to men, but I am unwilling to share.”

“You don’t mind—” She cuts herself off, shaking her head as her brow furrows together, red-painted nails sharply digging into the pale skin just above her knees as she takes in a shaky breath. Clarke must have not heard her right, or misunderstood due to the two wine coolers she’s had, or maybe envisioned it entirely, because that sounds a little like she would need Lexa’s permission to what? Be bisexual? It’s completely and stupidly besides the point anyway, because, “What the hell does that have to do with Bellamy and Wells? They’re my best friends.”

“You sure about that?” Lexa stares her down, eerily calm. She’s not mad, or upset. She’s actually being kind of understanding, which infuriates her, because there’s nothing to be understood. There’s nothing to be rational or forgiving about. Lexa is not doing her some huge favour here, implying she’s attracted to her best friends, who are like brothers to her, and then pretending she’s okay with it. 

“Yes,” Clarke cries out, getting frustrated now. Who is Lexa to imply that she has feelings for her friends — who are practically her brothers — just because they’re what, _men_? She pushes herself up onto her feet, reaching for her elbow, but Lexa catches her fingers before she can. “Are you seriously leaving?”

Lexa squeezes her fingers, once, giving her a patronizingly sorrowful look before dropping them. “I’m sorry, Clarke,” she says, solemnly, pushing open the door before closing it behind her with a soft click.

Clarke flops back into her bed, this time on her stomach, screaming into her pillow. This has to be a joke. It has to be. Once she rolls back over she pulls the headband from her hair, roughly tossing it somewhere on the ground. She should go to the party anyway, get drunk, maybe just find some willing overeager frat boy and get it over with. Clarke doesn’t want that, though. She’s too horny to cry, and too sad to even entertain the thought of a lackluster orgasm with her vibrator right now, knowing it won’t compare to actual human interaction with someone she really liked. Most of all, she’s angry. 

She tries to talk to Lexa over the span of the next few weeks, until the grapevine eventually tells her she’s back with her ex-girlfriend Costia who’s spending a semester abroad in France. They’re trying long distance, she’s told, and then Clarke really knows her shot is over. She can’t compete with someone putting up captions on pixelated FaceTime screenshots of Kate Chopin quotes and soulmate allusions geotagged from fucking Paris. She can’t compete with history.

Now that that can of particular worms is open though, she can’t stop thinking about it. Someone’s soft mouth on hers, eager hands on her breasts, knee against her warm, craving centre. Brushing her hair off her neck, teeth against her collarbone, fingers inside of her. A wet trail down her stomach, fingertips digging into her thighs, her name spilling from their lips. She _wants_ it, needs it.

So, by the time their holiday break rolls around, Clarke isn’t only sexually frustrated, she’s also kind of desperate. Which only intensifies when a few days before they’re all flying and/or driving back to their hometown, Wells casually lets it drop he’s now in a relationship with a girl from his old chess club. They’re doing this whole enemies to lovers thing, because they competed for Valedictorian back in high school and supposedly that’s created tension between them. And, guys, things are ‘ _heating up fast_ ’, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. She _is_ aware it sounds like Wells has been spending too much time on his old Merthur fanfic archive, but she is just _more_ aware, than ever, that she’s running out of time. 

Clarke doesn’t even know why it’s such a big deal to her. Maybe it’s her competitive streak coming into play, or the fact she really just wants to get the whole awkward virginity thing over with, perhaps it’s the dark inexplicable pang in the middle of her chest whenever she sees the constant rotation of girls on Bellamy’s Instagram and Snapchat. She figures it’s a healthy amount of jealousy, courtesy of their very codependent ways, sharing everything with each other since childhood. They’re all apart for the first time in a decade, going their own ways, perhaps even growing apart. 

She doesn’t think about why Wells’ honest to God girlfriend doesn’t bother her as much when in reality that should make her feel even worse. A girlfriend could screw with their dynamic, a bunch of one night stands rationally speaking won’t. It could be that she knows Wells too well to know there’s still a very big chance he won’t go through with it, that he’ll let the girl down easy before Christmas even rolls around. 

But. Then she finds herself thinking of his jacket covering her shivering body, drenched from the rain, her left arm throbbing with pain, his hand wrapped around hers as he told her it was all going to be okay. She thinks of that time he left Gina’s birthday party early to come pick her up at a friend’s house after almost having a panic attack, the nights he spent sleeping in her bed after her father died, how he never once complained about getting her coffee from the drive through that cost more than his hard limit of three dollars, and that one throw-away moment at the end of summer. That goodbye hug that lasted just a little too long, his arms tight around her waist, the intense look mirrored in both of their eyes as they pulled apart, the way she was afraid to say anything in case her voice gave out, before she got into her mom’s car and watched him and Wells disappear in the rearview mirror. 

It’s hard to explain, even to herself. It’s why she never thinks about it for too long. 

Which all brings her to tonight. An NYE party at the vacation house of some girl who went to the same high school as them, that has all the charms of a guaranteed bad hang-over in the morning — terrible beer, music that’s mostly crap and completely shit-faced people plastered across every available surface.

She hasn’t seen Wells since his father’s Christmas party. Clarke finally met Luna there in person. She’s beautiful, talked to her about the non-profit she’s interning at for half an hour and had nothing but love in her eyes whenever she looked at Wells. Clarke had asked her about the whole Valedictorian thing, and Luna had laughed, told her she let Wells win and that a GPA is a restrictive number in an already failing modern day school system, trying to divide and generalize them at the same time. So, the Merthur Archives, definitely, but he was still closer than Clarke was.

Wells is with her at her parents’ ski cabin right now, and from the way Bellamy was clapping his shoulder before he left way too early in the morning, Clarke figures he’s probably losing his v-card to her there. Which means — it _means_ that she’ll be the only one not to complete the pact. There’s no way she’s finding someone before midnight that she’d both feel comfortable with taking hers, and is even willing to do so in the first place. 

To make matters worse, Bellamy has totally ditched her to play beer pong with Bree, which she isn’t even sure isn’t code for hooking up in the coat closet. He knows she hates parties, especially when she doesn’t know anyone else there, and that she’s horrific at first impressions. She’s forced to make small-talk with Murphy, the loser who still hangs around their high school parking lot trying to pick up girls or chase lost glory and she used to share one Culinary Arts class with before he got suspended. 

All of it combined has put her in a sour mood. And a drinking mood, but since all there is fucking shitty beer that might as well be toilet water she can’t even get drunk, so that just makes her even more unreasonably upset at nothing in particular. Maybe at the fact she’s so high strung and obsessed with controlling every little detail, that she didn’t just get it over with back on campus with some frat boy she never had to see again after, that Wells and Bellamy managed to make it happen without even trying. It’s probably _because_ she’s trying too hard, people can probably tell. Perhaps she reeks of desperation.

It’s not fair that both of them beat her to it. Clarke wants to just be done with already, too. She wants to get it over with so she can get to the good stuff like them. She wants to be flirting with boys and girls at parties, or ask for someone’s number at a coffee shop without worrying about having to explain it’s her first time doing any of it when they eventually invite her over to their room. She wants to be free and nonchalant and spontaneous, not constantly weighed down by the fact that she’s a virgin. It’s not like she’s asking for much. 

Half an hour to midnight, she pushes her way outside to the porch for some fresh air. It’s there where Bellamy finally bothers to leave Bree and her attention-seeking ways behind and come find her. 

“What’s up with you?” He asks, half a chuckle in his voice as he leans his forearms on the railing, mirroring her. 

Clarke grits her teeth together, then slowly exhales through her nose. She keeps her eyes on the tree swing in the distance, swaying softly because of the wind. “Nothing.”

He elbows her playfully, although his tone is serious. Of course he sees right through her. “Come on. Don’t give me that.”

She just grumbles something indecipherable, pushing back her hair from her face with one hand. She still doesn’t look at him, scared she might give anything more away. From inside, there’s the muffled beat of a hiphop song playing joined by the distanced tumult of a bunch of teenagers getting drunk and having fun. Except for the couple making out on the other end of the porch and one stoner sprawled over the grass smoking and staring at the sky with glassy eyes, they’re alone. 

“I’m sorry about leaving you to go with Bree—” Bellamy starts, straightening back to his full height, and before she knows it, a flare of anger rises within her, burning white hot. She doesn’t recognize the feeling, but gets too lost in it to analyze it for very long.

Her head snaps to the side to glare at him, so fast her neck muscles protest with a twinge of pain, fingers tightening around the railing until her knuckles turn a pale white. “It’s not about Bree and her pathetic fuck-me eyes.”

“Okay,” he replies slowly, sounding a bit too amused for her liking. He leans back, crossing his arms over his chest. It makes his biceps bulge in a way that’s completely unfair when she’s been perpetually turned on since Halloween, and it sends a surge of want pulsing from her core. “Then what’s it about, princess?”

Has his voice always been so deep? She hesitates, not sure she even wants to share this with him. He might be her best friend, but it’s embarrassing on a level she can’t even try and start to describe. They talk, about things, about everything, from who would be most likely to survive an apocalypse to the crippling loss of a parent, but never _this_.

“I’m annoyed, okay?” She bites, heated, which immediately makes her feel guilty. It’s not his fault nobody wants her. Her shoulders sag but her death grip remains, desperate for some purchase. “I expected that I’d at least beat Wells to it. And since it’s all I can think about all the time now, I’m constantly horny.” A blush forms on her cheeks, down her neck and all over her collarbone, but she refuses to let that or the way his eyes widen slightly stop her. It’s only awkward if she lets it be. “I just feel so stupid. I mean, I had five months to get it over with like both of you, and here we are. What the hell is wrong with me?”

A tense silence wraps around them for a moment, Clarke’s heart pounding loudly in her chest as panic claws up her throat. She’s such a fucking idiot. She shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place. She’s sure neither of them would’ve actually held it against her if she didn’t lose her virginity before New Year’s, they’re better than that. She knows they are. She knows she isn’t. Clarke is just so — frustrated.

His tongue darts out to wet his lips, and she finds herself entranced with the movement. “I didn’t know you were so upset about it,” he starts, tentatively. Her blue eyes snap up to meet his, a smirk breaking across his stupid face. He’s teasing her, the asshole, when he says, “I mean, if you’re that desperate, I’ll do it.”

Her eyes narrow, finally pushing off the railing. A gust of wind greets her body, bristling her hair and making tiny goosebumps appear over her arms. She’s seconds away from angry tears, she can tell, her voice infused with bitterness. “Don’t make it sound like it’s such a fucking chore.”

Bellamy just kind of stares at her dumbly, his whole body grown tense, making her even more furious. Did he lose his tongue all of a sudden? He’s never had a problem sharing his opinions on her, no matter how negative, not before. “What?” She snaps, roughly brushing a strand of hair behind her ear before tucking her hands back underneath her opposite armpits. It’s a pathetic attempt at some sort of physical defense.

“It wouldn’t be a chore, Clarke,” he corrects her, after a beat, his eyes still slightly widened as if alarmed by the sound of himself speaking. He swallows visibly, his adam’s apple bobbing up and down in the low glow of the Christmas lights draped across the ceiling of the porch. Bellamy lifts one of his shoulders, casual, even if the movement is stiffer than it usually would be. “I just — I didn’t realize I was an option.”

Her heart trips over itself as silence stretches between them for a moment. She wants to ask him a million questions, but the best thing she can come up with is, “So you were serious?” Clarke raises her eyebrows, trying to figure out if he was just being nice, taking pity on her or if it was something much more dangerous than that. “You’ll do it?”

His jaw clenches briefly, his nostrils flaring. His searching eyes are nearly black on hers. Another second, and he asks, rough, “Do you want me to do it?”

She considers it. This is Bellamy, her best friend. He can always make her laugh, and there’s no one else she feels as much at ease with, and he’s definitely attractive, even Clarke has noticed as much. She likes his stubborn curls, his smile when someone catches him off guard, the sharp line of his jaw. And at the very least he would know what he’s doing. She trusts him. “Yes.”

Now that she’s aware it’s a possibility, she refuses to want anything else. It’d be kind of perfect, actually. There’s no one else she trusts like him. 

He clears his throat, blinking hard as he tears his eyes off her for a second, scrubbing his face with one of his hands. It’s very big, and Clarke finds herself wondering for the first time if it means the rest of him is big as well. Bellamy sniffs when his dark eyes land back on her. “Have you been drinking?”

“Just half a beer,” she answers, maybe a bit too eager, her hands dropping at her sides after smoothing down the bottom of her glittery top. She doesn’t want to give him enough time to talk himself out of it. “And I think someone diluted it with water so it barely counts.”

He nods, once, then nudges his head to the side. “Want to get out of here?”

Taking one more look around the porch, Clarke worries her bottom lip pensively, shooting him an apologetic look. “My parents are having colleagues over, so my house is definitely not an option.” 

Besides, she doesn’t want to risk them finding out and making it weird. Especially not if the consequence is going to be an open door policy whenever he or Wells are over. Nothing has to change after tonight.

“Thelonious is out,” he offers, hastily, then flinches when he seems to remember something else. “But Octavia might show up with her friends.”

Clarke nods, giving him another long searching look before she makes up her mind. It’ll be fine. This is Bellamy. She’s a pro at compartmentalizing and he’s sleeping with a different girl like every other night. It can just be sex. There’s no reason it can’t be. “Upstairs then?”

He makes some sort of agreeing hum, not more than a rough sound in the back of his throat, so she takes his hand in hers, pulling him back inside through the sliding doors. Her pulse flutters erratically for no reason, they’ve held hands before, it’s just — that nervous anticipatory feeling coursing through her veins. 

They push their way through the dancing crowd, making their way upstairs. She hopes no one is paying them any attention, but she also doesn’t really give a damn. They only have to knock on two doors before they find an empty room with a bed. 

Clarke lets go of his hand as soon as the door closes with a deafening click. Here they are. She swallows hard, holding his gaze. It seems kind of monumental, all of a sudden, standing here in this room with her best friend. He’s breathing so hard she wants to make fun of him, but then she realizes she’s breathing just as hard and bites her tongue. Someone laughs loudly in the hallways, pulling her back from her reverie. Scraping her throat, she offers, “Should we get undressed?”

“Sure,” he agrees, cool and collected, immediately reaching for the bottom of his shirt. Clarke eyes widen as he’s suddenly half-naked in front of her, and they’re not wasting away playing video games in the Jaha basement, or lazing around at the lake on a hot summer’s day. They’re in a bedroom, and he’s half-naked. 

And fuck, he looks good. All that golden brown skin on display, pulled tight over broad shoulders and the v’s of his hips. His freckled-covered chest heaving with every breath he takes. The little dark treasure trail beneath his belly button.

Bellamy raises his eyebrows at the look on her face, which must read more spooked than turned on, his eyes gleaming but amusement, but to his credit doesn’t say anything. When her eyes automatically lock in on his fingers reaching for the button on his jeans, she kickstarts into moving herself, if only so she has a reason to look away. 

She toes off her boots and shucks her ripped jeans, then crosses her arms at the bottom of her sequin top to pull it over her head. With each second that passes, her heartbeat crescendos until her ribcage feels like it might give in. Clarke meets his eyes again, reaching behind her to unclip her bra while still half kicking off her panties, hooked around her ankle, then winces when she notices her hair’s stuck.

“Let me help,” Bellamy insists, running a hand through his curls as he takes a step closer. For some reason the thought of him touching her right now is panicking, mostly because this can’t be very sexy to him.

“I’m fine,” she presses stubbornly, but he’s already pushing at her arms for her to turn around. His hands are warm on her rapidly stiffening shoulders as he gingerly frees her hair from the strap of her bra. When she turns back around he’s closer than she’d expected, close enough for her to feel his breath on her face. Still, she manages a mostly begrudging, “Thanks,” as she tosses her bra somewhere off to the side.

“You’re welcome,” he declares, and he’s smirking smugly in a way that he knows pisses her off, so she almost calls him an asshole, but then he’s hooking his thumbs into his boxers, pushing them down his hips and her breath catches in the back of her throat before she can even form the thought. He’s still too close, and somehow that makes her brain short circuit, so she sinks down on the bed as soon as she feels the mattress digging into the back of her knees. He’s hard, she thinks, and she wonders if boys get hard just thinking about sex. If it matters at all that it’s her, naked in front of him.

After she’s stared for a few long seconds, he clears his throat.

“Well?” He urges, as if he’s asking her for a review on Yelp.

Clarke slowly drags her eyes up, blinking at him for a second before her brows pucker. She scoffs. “Well what? You know I’ve never seen a real life dick before.”

“Huh?” He muses thoughtfully, scratching the bottom of his jaw absently. 

She narrows her blue eyes, everything feeling so much more offensive now that they’re both naked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Bellamy counters, overly defensive. He leans against the bed post with his shoulder, crossing his arms over his chest. Another beat, and then, “It’s just — I would swear to God you at least went to second base with Collins.”

“We did.” She rolls her eyes, disgusted just thinking back on it, her hands tightening around the edge of the bed. Where was her dignity? She wasn’t even desperate back then. “He shoved his fingers up inside of me for ten very uncomfortable minutes and then came in his pants.”

He snorts dryly, humoured, pushing off the bed post to come sit down beside her. The bed dips under his weight. “You sure do know how to pick ‘em, princess.”

“That’s why I’m here with you,” she snarks back, glaring at him.

“Hey,” he huffs, offended, then seems to get distracted. He pushes her hair off her shoulder, fingertips grazing her collarbone, starting to press kisses up her neck. She can feel his words vibrate against her throat, her finger digging harder into the mattress to keep from reaching out for him. “Am I not the one doing you the favor here?”

There’s an embarrassing surge of wetness between her thighs, which hasn’t ever happened to her before, so obviously she gets defensive, just because. “Fine,” she relents, tilting her head to the side to give him more acces. She eyes him again, the long, hard line of his cock resting against his lower abdomen. She says it fast, so it’s easier, “You have a nice dick.” He nips at her pulse point before pulling back with a stupid grin while she lets out a little squeak. “Although I’m not sure how we’re going to fit that inside of me. Happy?”

“It’ll fit,” he assures her confidently, hand coming up the side of her neck, running his thumb over her bottom lip. His eyes linger there, even as they part and her tongue dips out to wet her lips.

She’ll have to take his word for it. “What about me?”

His eyebrow quirks, finally dragging his eyes back up to hers as the corner of his mouth twitches. “I don’t see a dick on you.”

She slaps his hand off her neck, stomping her fist into his ribs, hard. “Fuck you.”

“That’s the plan, isn’t it?” Bellamy taunts, completely unaffected, and she wants to wipe that fucking smirk off his face so badly. He’s an ass. She sucks in her stomach involuntarily as his hand slides over it, moving up on her side soothingly enough to make her relax into it. His smirk turns softer now, more like _her_ Bellamy, not the one everyone else gets. “You look gorgeous.” His thumb moves over her ribs, just beneath her breasts, sending a shiver up her spine as his eyes dip back down to look at her. “Perfect.”

Clarke struggles to breathe normally, her eyes fixated on his familiar face. The words strike something deep and longing within her, something dormant she never even knew was there, something that makes her freeze up entirely. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the muscles in his hand move as he strokes the sensitive skin over her ribs. 

“Soft,” he adds, with the hint of a chuckle, like it’s an inside joke. His fingers stop moving, his brown eyes slowly dragging back up to her face, looking up at her through his dark lashes. “Always knew you would.”

Her eyebrows jump with surprise as her fingers come up to wrap around his elbow, keeping him in place just in case. She can’t think straight if he’s actively touching her. “You’ve thought about how I look naked?”

“Of course I have,” he admits, easily, as if it’s just normal for every best friend to think about that sort of stuff. It makes her blush, but only because he says it so matter-of-factly. Here she was, feeling ashamed about ever even just entertaining the though of what Wells or Bellamy would look like naked. Mostly just Bellamy, but it feels safer, like this. Grouping them together. Her two best friends.

“Can you just kiss me or something?” Clarke asks heatedly, mostly annoyed at herself for feeling so awkward about this whole thing. About the fact she’s thought about this exact situation before, about him. It doesn’t mean there’s any feelings involved. This is Bellamy. He’d do the same for Wells, and so would she. She thinks. They can come back from this. Once the question is out, she reconsiders it, reigning in some of her earlier bravado. Maybe he wants to keep things as platonic as possible. “Or will that be too weird?”

Bellamy snorts, pulling his head back so he can give her a pointed look. “We’re about to fuck and you’re asking me if it’d be weird if we kissed.”

“It’s different,” she points out, more brattily than necessary, knowing she’s right. There’s lines, and no matter how many they’re crossing tonight, have crossed already, there’s always more.

“Okay, whatever you say,” he concedes, although sarcasm is laced with his voice, a lazy, amused grin spreads across his face the closer he leans to hers. “I’m definitely going to kiss you though.”

She doesn’t want to think about how apparently he never imagined them doing this without any kissing, and instead reaches out to pinch his ribs, trying to regain some semblance of composure while trying to wrap her mind around how fast this entire situation has escalated. She doesn’t want to examine why she’s feeling so panicked all of a sudden. Gruffly, she presses, “Hurry up and do it alrea—”

His mouth is on hers, catching her enough by surprise that he’s immediately able to slip his tongue between her lips, insistent. Her head tilts back sharply to meet his kisses, and everything about it is overwhelming. The fact it’s _him_ , his big hand palming the side of her face, the other dropping to her thigh, dragging her closer, squeezing her ass and earning himself a little squeak. It only takes her a second to get herself back together, figuring two can play that game. 

Bellamy lets out a little _oh_ when she roughly grabs him by the shoulders, climbing on top of him as she pushes closer, a knee on each side of his thighs. One of his hands comes up on the small of her back, the other immediately bracing their weight behind him. She smirks with smug satisfaction against his mouth at regaining the upperhand, although it fades quickly when he grinds up against her, just a little, and she remembers they’re both naked. 

His cock is nestled up against her belly, and when she glances down, it’s an intimidating sight to say the least. Bellamy’s hand moves up her spine, winding his fingers into her blond hair at the back of her skull to pull her closer. His kisses are messy and desperate, assertive in a way that have her slide her eyes shut and forget about it everything and anything all over again. She loses herself in it, feels wild with want, unable to stop her body from shifting and wriggling, twisting and moving, desperate for pressure, rhythm, release. _Him._

Bellamy pulls away after a while, smiling a little when she chases his mouth. He combs her hair away from her face, gaze dipping down to her red mouth and then back up to her blue eyes, blinking at him in question. “Let’s lay down, yeah?”

Forehead against his, she nods, breathless, carefully lifting off him before crawling up the bed. Bellamy nestles into her side, his mouth latching back onto hers as soon as they’re both comfortable. His hand rests over her jaw, tipping up her chin so he can kiss down her neck, nipping at her pulsepoint. Arousal shoots through her spine, settling almost painfully in her centre. 

Both of his rough hands cup her breasts as he moves further down, nosing at the side of one of them as he kisses her sternum, thumbs flicking over her nipples. Her breathing turns harder, faster, her entire body straining to keep still. He peppers more kisses to the fleshy part of the mound, before sucking one of the hardened peaks into his mouth next, her nails meanly biting into his biceps at the sensation.

She expects him to move on, but he lingers — kissing, nipping, sucking, lapping. The thorough attention to that part of her body has her thinking, smiling to herself before biting down onto her bottom lip to keep in a whimper when his teeth graze the sensitive pink bud. “I _knew_ you were a boob guy.”

“Obviously,” he hums in agreement, gruff, mouthing his way over to her other breast.

He must feel her laugh before he can hear it, because he’s pulling back a little to look up at her before the sound even passes her lips. He sighs, wearily, pinching the bridge of his nose. “What is it?”

Clarke stifles another laugh. “Just remembering that time we were hit by that surprise summer storm and you convinced Gina—”

“I didn’t lie,” he corrects her, hastily, a furrow in his brows. “It wasn’t see-through.” He lifts a shoulder, probably deciding to own up to it as his face relaxes. “In the beginning.”

“Sure,” she relents, smirking, deciding to give him the reluctant win because she also got to enjoy the show. He rolls his eyes, pressing a smacking kiss to her mouth presumably to shut her up, before resuming his earlier work, this time mouthing further down her sternum, over her waist, towards her lower belly. 

Once he reaches just below her belly button, she pushes herself up on her elbows, warily demanding, “What are you doing?”

“Jesus.” His head shoots back up to look at her, and although he’s grinning his voice is laced with tired heat. “Are you just gonna keep talking the whole way through?”

“Sorry,” she mutters, bringing one hand up to scrub at her face. Pretending like they’re just hanging out makes it somewhat easier to stay calm. “My mind is kind of racing.” 

“I know,” he smiles fond, kissing her hipbone before lifting up, hands warm on the outside of her thigh. “Isn’t it always?” She swallows tightly, realizing he doesn’t really need a response. Her heart thuds in anticipation when Bellamy, on his knees, extensively looks her up and down, as if he’s memorizing her body, learning every inch of it. His pupils, dark and fat with want, fix between her legs, and he’s barely even touching her, fingers just skimming up her hips, but she desperately wants to squirm, tension building fast. Casually, he explains, “I’m going to go down on you, because we don’t have any lube and I don’t want to hurt you.”

“What? _No_ ,” Clarke opposes, quickly, scrambling for a way out. Having his face so close to that part of her has her internally freaking out. It seems too — intimate. Something you’d do with your girlfriend, not a random hook-up at a party. And better yet, it wasn’t part of the deal. “You don’t have to.”

“Don’t worry,” he brushes her off, voice soothing as he pays her objections no mind, kissing the junction of her hip and thigh. “I like going down on girls.”

His fingers grasp at her knees, spreading her legs more as he noses at her mons, turning his head to nip at the inside of her thigh, tongue darting out to soothe the spot, and she feels the anticipation, the pleasure, the burning white hot inside of her, and she knows, she _knows_ she really has no reason to say no. Bellamy stops before moving further down, his eyes glancing up, silently asking if it really _is_ okay, because he’s stupid like that.

Clarke nods, teeth sliding down over her bottom lip just in time to bite back a moan as his fingers hold her open and he licks into her. Her fingers fly out to curl into his hair, the other one clapping over her mouth. It’s almost like torture, his mouth — licking, and sucking, and stroking all along her slit, teasing her clit, and that’s before he slides one of his fingers inside of her. Little cries of pleasure escape her throat as she tips her head back, biting down on one of her knuckles to keep quiet. 

A second finger stretches her open further, her walls fluttering in anticipation as she’s quickly worked very near to the edge. His fingers pump out of her slowly at first, but soon enough drive into her harder and faster, each thrust sending her closer and closer, her fingers tightening in his hair in a way that must be painful. His name is a broken moan as he sucks her clit inside his mouth at the same time as he crooks his fingers just a little, just right, little white stars beginning to dot her vision.

“That’s right,” he encourages her, the vibrations of his deep voice against her clit making her tremble. “There you go, pretty girl.”

Just like that, another curl of his fingers, his tongue flat against the nub at the top of her slit, she’s falling over the edge, a warm feeling coursing through her veins. His fingers don’t let up on that spot, dragging out her pleasure until she’s twitching with oversensitivity, pushing at his hand and trying to bring up her knees. 

It makes an embarrassing sound when he finally relents and pulls his fingers from her, his hand wet as it curls around her hip and he comes back up to her face. She assumes he’s going to kiss her, but he wipes his mouth with the back of his other hand, before leaning his weight on his fist, staring down at her with a stupidly smug grin. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Clarke grumbles, turning her head to the side and slinging an arm over her eyes. Fuck, he’s annoying. She’s going to need a minute to recover, her chest still heaving. She can’t deal with him and his ego right now.

“Did you like that, Clarke?” He prods, deep voice dripping with faux innocence and arrogance. He already knows the answer, so he’s just playing stupid.

“Shut up,” she bites, annoyed. Then, after a second, sighs, turning her head back to look at him and grabbing his bare shoulders to pull him down to kiss her. He tastes funny, and his weight is warm on top of her, a thin layer of sweat covering his brown skin. She can feel his need for her digging into her thigh. “Can’t believe we’ve finally found a worthwhile purpose for that mouth of yours.”

“Ha-ha,” Bellamy deadpans, even though he’s half laughing, leaning down to bud his nose at hers. He sits back on his heels again, jutting his head to the side. “Gonna grab a condom.” He waits for her to nod before getting off the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight as the grave realisation of what they’re about to do settles in.

She finds she’s not as nervous as she thought she would be. If she really thinks about it, doing this with Bellamy — someone who knows her, truly knows her — is kind of the best case scenario. Still, there _is_ a healthy amount of nerves involved. Especially when he returns to the bed, still half rolling the condom over his hard dick and making her wonder if she couldn’t have started out with someone smaller her first time around. She takes a deep breath as he climbs back on top of her. Once an overachiever, always an overachiever, she figures.

Bellamy kisses her again, soft and sweet, mouth moving over hers long enough for her to relax back into it. She lets him bury his face in her neck and then down so his nose is right up between her breasts. She’s ready, so ready, but then he positions himself at her entrance, and she can’t help but take in a sharp breath and blurt out, “I’m sorry if I suck.”

He could have any other girl at this party, definitely the majority of whomst are way more experienced than her, could probably show him somewhat of a better time, and yet here he is. She wouldn’t go so far to call him a saint, but — well, he is doing her a huge favor. She knows a lot of girls and boys would want to be her first, for a range of stupid misogynistic reasons, but she wouldn’t have felt this safe with any of them.

“You won’t suck,” he promises, lifting his head to look at her. His mouth twitches. “Unless you want to, then I’m totally game.”

She pinches his shoulder, the one he injured playing basketball in tenth grade, so she knows it’ll hurt. He winces, and it makes it easier. “I’m nervous,” she admits, quiet, allowing herself a moment of vulnerability. “The bar is kinda high. Your first time was a fucking threesome.”

“And yours is with one of your high school best friends because no one else will look at you,” he jokes, eyes gleaming in that boyish way he does when he’s up to no good.

_Bro._ Clarke tilts her head, looking down at him in disbelief. “If you were still capable of hurting my feelings, this would be one of those times.”

He rolls his eyes, sighing heavily as his hands tighten around her hips briefly. “Clarke, I promise you it was so not sexy.” His tongue darts out to wet his lips as his eyes rake her face, a pained look on his at the memory. “There were _so_ many hands, and mouths, and _legs_ , and in the end I think I lasted like thirty seconds.”

They stare at each other for a second and then she laughs, and so does he, and that does make her feel better, lighter. She takes a deep breath, digging her fingers into his ribs on either side. “Okay, let’s do this.”

“I might not last long _now,_ ” he presses, like it's a warning, and for the first time since they started there’s just the hint of him sounding insecure.

She raises her eyebrows, judgmentally. “So what was the point of whoring around all these months?”

He gives her a pointed look, nostrils flaring just slightly. “I’ve worked up my stamina, don’t worry, it’s just—” Bellamy pauses, hesitatingly, then answers, like it’s supposed to mean something and isn’t the vaguest statement he’s ever made, “This is _you._ ”

She palms the back of his neck, tugging him closer to her mouth. “Just think of kittens, or something.”

She can feel him huff against her lips before they’re kissing, his hand disappearing back in between them. He kisses her harder then, swallowing down the whimper she makes as the head of cock starts to press inside of her. Just a few more inches, and he stops, giving her a second. It stung at first, more a throbbing now, but the fact she’s so wet definitely helps make it easier. There’s a long moment of stillness, the only sound between them their heavy breaths as their lips hover over each other’s.

Finally, she tilts her hips, urging him on as Bellamy slams his mouth back against her, pushing further inside. The throbbing isn’t fun, but it’s manageable, especially when he’s kissing her like that. Wet, and dirty, and needy, fingers twisting her nipple, working her up, grazing down the soft skin of her belly to rub at her clit next. Like that, it’s nice, good even, sending little jolts of pleasure up her spine.

His hand slides from her side to her hip, moving back to grip her ass, shifting closer, deeper, and she doesn’t have a choice but to release his mouth, tipping her head back to take a gulp of air. It actually feels so — good. It feels great. She tightens the arm around his shoulders, keeping him pressed right up against her, so the only space between their bodies is when he pulls his hips back to thrust back inside of her. 

Bellamy doesn’t have a lot of space like this, just kissing whatever part of her face he can reach. Her cheek, the corner of her mouth, her ear. God, he’s fucking into her with earnest now, the devastating rhythm of his hips ceaselessly building up her arousal as his breath skates across the skin of cheek with hot, heavy puffs timed with each thrust. Clarke is giving all her effort to try and stay quiet, but she’s losing awareness of why fast, not entirely convinced anyone could hear her above the music playing downstairs anyway.

One moment, she’s full of tension and the next, his fingers press down on her clit hard, making her bury her mouth against the warm, salty skin of his shoulder as she comes. Her body arches into him, and then back into the bed like it’s not sure what to do, ecstasy washing over her. She’s sure she blacks out for a second.

“Clarke,” he breathes, and she doesn’t _know_ for sure, but can still kind of tell he must be close. His rhythm is fast and faltering, his brows pinched together.

“What?” She pants, voice hoarse as she laughs softly, still high on her second orgasm. Teasing him, “Are you gonna tell me you love me?”

“I do love you,” Bellamy allows, pausing, his entire body pinning her to the mattress. For a second, she is breathless, gauging his face to see if he’s serious, and then he smirks and nips at her jaw, slamming back inside of her at the same time, a shock of sharp pleasure firing off through her entire body. “Brat.”

Clarke forces out another breathy laugh, then shifts her knees up a little, spreading just enough to let him in deeper. It must feel good, because he groans, jerking into her with a gasp as she feels a new warmth bloom inside of her. His forehead drops to her shoulder, pressing sloppy, uncoordinated kisses to her heated skin. 

She’s still catching her breath when he rolls off of her and pulls out of her, insisting it’ll be worse the longer they wait. She trusts him, so she goes along with it, even though her skin prickles with the need to stay close to thim. Luckily, as soon as he disposes the condom, he flops back down beside her, wrestling his arm around her shoulders and pulling her into his side. 

He presses a kiss to her sweaty temple. “You should always pee.”

She twists her head to blink at him. “Huh?”

“After sex,” he presses, as if she’s being stupid and it’s not him whose being vague. “This girl Harper told me one time. It’s ‘cause your urinary tract is shorter or whatever.”

“Huh,” Clarke says, turning her head back so she’s facing the ceiling, considering it. She’s taken enough biology classes for it to make sense. “I’ll do it in a minute.” Absently, she reaches up to intertwine her fingers with the ones dangling from her shoulder. “Was Harper the one with the septum piercing?”

“Emori?” He snorts. “I tried. She has a boyfriend.” 

“Was it the Trump supporter?” She crunches up her face, digging her nails into the back of his hand as her brows pinch together. “I don’t want to be taking secondhand sex advice from a MAGA.”

“You mean Ontari? God no. I told you I dodged that bullet in time, remember? Raven took pity on me and let me go home with her.” _Right._ She does remember the story of how he saw the confederate flag keychain _before_ leaving a public space to be alone with her. His first near death experience. He helps her along, “Harper’s the blonde with the sixpack.”

“Oh. From your Political Science class?”

“That’s the one.”

It’s quiet for a moment, the sweat on their bodies slowly cooling as she thinks over tonight’s events. She expected that things would be different, but she mostly feels the same. A little sore, but good. And things with her and Bellamy definitely don’t seem tainted, _thank God_. Which makes her think that, maybe they should be. They had sex. He’s her best friend. They’re laying here in comfortable silence.

“Shouldn’t this be weirder?” Clarke wonders, absentmindedly.

“Probably, yeah,” he agrees, with a nonchalance that makes her ease back into his side. If he doesn’t care, neither does she.

She stares at a dark spot on the ceiling, a question rising up in her. “Why did it take you so long?”

She can feel him shift to look at her, his eyes burning into the side of her face. “What do you mean?”

Her tongue dips out to wet her lips, and then she slowly turns her head to meet his gaze. “I know why it took _me_ so long.” She smiles, self-deprecatory. “I mean, my priorities were different in high school and it takes me a while to warm up to anyone, but you had to swat people away from you ever since you started puberty.”

Bellamy’s mouth parts, but then it closes again. He looks at her silently, for a long moment. Then he swallows, averting his eyes as he says, “Just never really had the time, I guess.”

It makes sense. He spent all of his time with them, or Octavia, or studying, or working, or at the gym. She thinks he could’ve made it work though, if he wanted to. The expression on his face is closed off in the same way it always is when he’s grumpy, and she doesn’t want to push it.

Downstairs, the crowd grows loud as it starts to count down from somewhere around four before erupting into cheers.

Bellamy smiles at her, although just a tiny bit forced, his suddenly sour mood gone as he twists his body around and lifts their hands to his mouth so he can kiss the back of hers. “Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year,” she echoes, watching him swing his legs over the edge of the bed, reaching for one of the shirts on the ground. As an afterthought, she adds, “And thanks. For all this.”

He tosses her top and her bra her way, glancing over his shoulder at her, winking terribly in that way he always does. “Don’t mention it.”

She slides her arms through the straps of her bra, teasing him, “Maybe your resolution should be to finally learn how to wink.”

“Maybe yours should be to learn how not to ruin a moment.”

In the morning, the three of them get brunch with Octavia at a little diner in the middle of town, their New Year’s tradition. Wells came back early from his trip to Luna’s cabin and has been weirdly mute about it. She has decided not to press him for the moment.

Octavia’s a freshman now, spotty and way too skinny and dying weird colored streaks into her hair. It’s blue this week. For some reason, Clarke and she never got along any more than what was necessary to appease Bellamy. There was always this underlying tension, this strange jealousy radiating off of Octavia whenever she was near Bellamy. Clarke just figured she was scared of losing her brother like she’d lost both her parents, and over time it faded. They’d never be close, but they were civil. 

They even had nice days, did things just the two of them, like a day at the spa whenever the boys’ went on one of their boring fishing trips. It was during one of those days Clarke told her she was glad she mellowed out of her teen angst and Octavia confessed she was always worried Bellamy would replace her. 

“What made you change your mind?” She had wondered, closing her fists around two bottles of nail polish with a purse of her lips, still deciding between ‘ _Do You Sea What I Sea_ ’ and ‘ _Houston We Have A Purple_ ’. Then Octavia condescendingly told her, laughing as if it had been the most obvious thing in the world, “Well, you’re definitely _not_ Bellamy’s sister.” 

At the time, her feelings were kind of hurt, and the comment mostly left her confused. Was Octavia implying Bellamy didn’t love her as much? That she wasn’t as important to him? It hadn’t really made sense until now. Bellamy didn’t see her as his sister, that much was obvious. It didn’t mean he loved her any less.

“How was the NYE party?” Octavia wonders, ripping off a piece of waffle before dipping it into Wells’ vanilla shake. He pulls a face but doesn’t say anything. 

Soon after midnight, they went over to her house, ordered a pizza, drank three quarters of the beer in the house before passing out in Marcus’ movie room halfway through Love Actually. Before she can answer, Bellamy smirks, leisurely, stuffing a forkful of scrambled egg into his mouth. “Ended with a bang.”

Clarke jostles his knee with hers, narrowing her eyes at him. “It was good,” she presses, forcing her face back into something neutral.

“Good?” He echoes, half-offended as he gives her a look, eyebrows raised.

“It was _nice_ ,” she corrects herself, refusing to give him any more than that, pulling a face at him that only causes his smirk to grow.

“Weirdos,” Octavia mutters, at the same time as Wells and his amused grin inquire, “Did you get drunk?”

“Did you get naked?” Bellamy asks him, expertly changing the subject. 

“Gross,” Octavias says with a grimace, stealing a piece of her brother’s bacon and biting off the end. Instead of scolding her like he would Clarke, he absentmindedly shoves his plate further toward her.

Wells looks a bit sheepish, looking down at the table as he plays with a pack of sugar in his hands where they’re resting above the table. “I couldn’t go through with it.”

Bellamy slouches back into the booth, voice full of disbelief as one of his hands disappears into his hair. “No way, dude. You’re giving that girl major blue balls at this point. She was all over you at Christmas.” 

She leans her elbows on the table, a pensive look filtering onto her face. The entire reason she had that whole downwards spiral last night was because he seemed so close. She knew the odds were he’d still chicken out regardless, but she doesn’t understand why. “I thought you were into her? You’ve been dating for two months.”

“I mean, I guess I just — I wanted it to be special.” His fist closes around the pack of sugar as his brows furrow together. “Someone special.”

His dark eyes flick over to Clarke briefly, who just averts her gaze. Something strange is clawing up her throat, making her chest feel tight. Bellamy’s suddenly looking weirdly at her too, and she realizes the expression on her face must not be so relaxed as she’s intented. Awkwardly, she hopes to break the tension with, “Well, since it’s January first, I guess that means we both lost.”

She can’t tell him. Not when he looks so down. Not when he’s going to ask her who it was. 

Bellamy stiffens beside her, but it only lasts a second, and then he’s smirking smugly all over again. “And I guess that makes me the winner,” he boasts, proudly. “Like always.”

She shares a look with Wells, rolling her eyes at their friend’s arrogance and he stifles a laugh in return. Unfortunately Bellamy catches her, throwing his arm around her to jostle her, poking her in the ribs the furthest away from him until she’s begging him to stop. Octavia shakes her head, mumbling about how she isn’t even going to ask, and Wells is laughing at Clarke’s anguish and it’s just like always. 

She thinks that is that. Bellamy taking her virginity is just another thing they’ve done together, like so many other things, no big deal. Other people could be weird about it though, _especially_ Octavia and Wells, so it’s not really worth it to tell. She’ll make up some story about a girl or guy in her class a few weeks from now, and that’ll be that, the two of them none the wiser. It’s better that way. It just is.

Yet. 

The day before she leaves for college she goes over to the Jahas house, hoping to hang with her friends one last time before it’s back to boring classes, lame parties and forced acquaintances. They could watch a movie, maybe go to the woods for a hike. 

“Where’s Wells?” Clarke wonders, falling down on the couch after tossing her tote on top of the chaise longue. She frowns, half-expecting him to come out of hiding any moment soon.

Bellamy doesn’t even take his eyes off the screen, just accepts her feet in his lap as she kicks off her shoes and settles in. “He’s with Luna.”

“Oh.” He probably had something to make up to her. Her heart skips a beat, coming to an abrupt stop before it kick-starts at an erratically fast pace. Somehow the most innocent of questions feels dangerous. “Octavia?”

“Out with friends,” he answers, dryly, finally tearing his eyes off the television to look at her. 

“Okay,” she says, not sure why her mouth is suddenly drying up as her eyes lock on his. Everything feels a lot less casual than when she’d entered the house. She realizes this is the first time they’ve been alone, just the two of them, since New Year’s. 

Silence stretches between them for hours, seconds, she’s not sure. Her breaths are coming in hard, his pupils are dark and wide. His warm fingers trace over the edge of her sock, before moving under the cuff of her jeans, up her shin. “Since they’re not here…”

Before she knows it, she’s climbing over to the other side of the couch, lowering her mouth to his. He immediately opens up for her, tugging her closer. 

They didn’t really talk about it, but it was kind of implied it would be a one time thing. He did her favor and got an orgasm out of it, and it could just be something they’d laugh about in ten years. Like, _ha-ha, remember that time we had sex?_ Yet, it’s like a switch has been flipped, one she didn’t even know was there, one she didn’t even know she _could_ flip, and now it’s like she’s an addict. She can’t get enough.

She knows. She _knows_ it’s a bad idea. 

“You sure?” He murmurs against her lips, eyes still closed as his thumb sweeps over her cheekbone. His mouth is wet from her spit, his hair wild from her fingers. She’s never wanted anything more in her life.

Clarke reaches for the strings of his sweatpants in between them, untying them. “Just this once.”

“Just this once,” he echoes, groaning into her mouth as her tiny fingers wrap around his cock. 

Famous last words, and all. 

┇

  
  
  



	2. that's the thing about illicit affairs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve only done it once. The guy didn’t seem to like it very much.” He kept shoving her face toward his dick, and when she finally relented, more than once made her gag around him without her permission or obvious enjoyment. Afterwards, he complained about her not swallowing. It wasn’t sexy. This angle kind of works for them anyway, so she tries it, placing a hand on his thigh, “Maybe you could give me some tips?”
> 
> Like predicted, implying it’s for her benefit takes some of the pressure of.
> 
> Bellamy slowly pushes a deep, resigned sigh from his lips, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. He puts his popcorn in the empty seat beside him, quietly unbuttoning his jeans, which seems like enough of an invitation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dont hate me. sometimes, to the tune of smash mouth's all star, "the words start coming and they dont stop coming". this chapter is sexy and sad. saxy, if you will.
> 
> huge thank you to maria for basically being my beta! youre the sweetest.

┇

_part ii: that’s the thing about illicit affairs_

┇

Clarke worries. At this point, it’s kind of natural. On the way to the airport, she wonders what this is going to mean for them, this new sideroad their relationship has taken. The entire flight, she dissects and overanalyzes everything about their last encounter before she left. Was their goodbye hug too long, too short, too tight? Did she avoid too much direct eye-contact? Did her mom just instinctively _know_? She stresses, and keeps stressing, even when she’s back in her dorm and Josie’s talking her ear off about the sapphire necklace her dad got her for Christmas.

She seamlessly segues into their insanely difficult Bio lab class, and mentions how for the past week she’s already been preparing for it, and Clarke considers her and Josie friends but yet still doesn’t know how to tell her that _she_ ’s spent the last week fucking one of her best friends. At some point it becomes too late to casually mention it, and Clarke decides it’s better kept a secret anyway. 

Josie has lots of strong opinions, and Clarke has enough trouble worrying about her own. She doesn’t have enough life experience to rationalize the situation like she usually does. All the movies she’s seen on the subject tell her you can’t have sex without feelings, especially not with your best friends, and well. She _has_ a lot of feelings about Bellamy. He’s her—hers. Special. 

But it doesn’t mean she loves him in a romantic way, or that she’s secretly pining away for him, or something equally stupid like that. She hasn’t been in love with anyone before, but she thinks she would know what it feels like. On most days, she can hardly stand him, yet she knows that romantic feelings are what people are going to assume, and if they place those thoughts in her head, or _worse,_ in Bellamy’s, it _is_ going to change everything. She doesn’t want that to ever happen.

On Wednesday he calls her to complain about his roommate for an hour, and they argue about the new season of Vikings for the next forty-five minutes. Once they hang up, she realizes she’s let out a sigh of relief she didn’t even know she’d been holding. Part of her had expected a major shift in their relationship, that maybe it should’ve meant something, what happened between them, but it hasn’t and they’re fine. Overly fine in a way that maybe should be weird, would be to others. They just don’t get it.

In hindsight it makes complete and total sense, because this _is_ still Bellamy she’s talking about. He’s the guy who let her and Octavia paint his nails and put butterfly clips in his hair at fifteen; who forces her to watch the History Channel more often than she wants; who broke his nose during a fistfight after someone accused her of using her father’s death for brownie points; who yells at her for being too loud and having chronically cold feet and bad opinions on the History Channel; who is incredibly annoying when it comes to money and his stupid truck and his dumb sister; and who’ll ask her with a straight face if he needs to put on more deodorant and makes fun of the bags under her eyes without shame. And now he’s just the guy who she happened to have sex with for the first few times. 

It’s just who they are. The more Clarke thinks about it, the more she’ll start to question it. So she decides not to think about it at all. 

┇

Bellamy comes to her room on Saturday night. It’s spring break, the first time they’ve seen each other in person since the holidays. She’s on the bed in her pyjama shorts and fluffy socks, iPad in her lap. 

“Hey,” he pants in greeting, still a little out of breath from the four flight of stairs to the wing of the house she pretty much has to herself. It’s a little unsettling, to look up and see him all of a sudden.

“Hey!” She echoes, surprised, as she clambers to sit up straighter in her bed, lowering her Beats down to her neck. She feels a little breathless too. 

He’s still standing by the door, like an idiot, and Clarke focuses on getting her phone to stop playing Clairo on repeat, still faintly crooning from her headphones. “Your mom let me in.”

She scrambles for anything else to say but _Oh_. Her heart is beating a mile a minute and for some indecipherable reason, trying to speak right now feels like pulling teeth. “I didn’t realize you’d gotten in yet.”

“I did. Earlier.” He gives her a little shrug, as if to say same old, same old, hands stuffed in the front pockets of his jeans. “But Octavia wanted me to take her to the mall.”

She nods, still frozen in place as she watches him. He looks good. His hair is a bit longer, and his skin has darkened from the sun, freckles even more apparent. Clarke scrapes her throat, unable to shake the feeling that she’s treading on very thin ice, and it’s ready to pull her under at any moment. “I was just doing a commission for my Tumblr, but if you give me ten minutes we can watch something together.” 

There’s nothing to propose a peace offering for, but it still feels like one, and he takes it. 

“Sure,” he agrees, and this is usually where they would hug, but something keeps the both of them from reaching out. She settles back against her headboard, trying to focus on the iPad in her lap as he sits down on the chair by her desk, picking up one of her textbooks to idly flip through. 

It’s quiet as Clarke stares at the nearly finished drawing of Catradora closely slow dancing, bottom lip tugged between her teeth, flicking the stylus against the edge of the tablet. It’s a bit strange. Him sitting there. He doesn't do personal space. Usually. Maybe she’s giving off the wrong vibes. She was just — _surprised_ to see him. That’s all. 

“Come over here,” she demands, deciding this is only strange because they’re letting it be strange, patting the empty spot beside her. So what they had sex? She and Wells used to take baths together. “Don’t be awkward.”

He scoffs, putting her Chemistry book back onto her desk with a little thud. “Last time we were in a bed together—”

She quirks a knowing eyebrow. “A couch too, so that leaves us with minimal sitting options, then.”

“This desk chair is neutral ground,” Bellamy argues, leaning back in the chair, palms resting on his thighs. Slowly, his eyes start to glitter with mischief, and she knows what he is about to say is going to be terrible. “Unless..”

“Shut up,” she deadpans, flicking one of her balled up sticky notes at his head, smiling despite his suggestivity. Some of the earlier tension drains from the room and it’s suddenly not weird, this. It’s the least weird thing in her life. “Your game has gotten even worse I see.”

“You don’t need game when you’re irresistible,” he counters, his lips curving into a smirk. 

Her mouth opens to reply, but then there’s a small knock on the door, and it opens. 

“Hey, you’re already here,” Wells notes, looking at Bellamy, a tray of lemonade with two glasses in his hands. Abby doesn’t usually allow condiments upstairs, but she always lets him get away with everything as soon as he turns on the charm. 

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, awkwardly, as their other friend sets the tray down on the desk and then flops down on the bed beside Clarke, leaning over to hug her. Her eyes meet his over Wells’ shoulder, but she quickly looks away. “O wanted me to take her to the mall, then ditched me as soon as I bought her the pet snake Theo refused to get her.”

He laughs in response, shaking his head. “It’s why she took you and not me, bro, you’re way too easy.”

Bellamy slants his head slightly to the side with his lips pursed, rolling his eyes. He’s not going to deny it when they all know Octavia has him wrapped around her finger. He licks his lips, picking up one of the glasses and filling it with lemonade before tipping his head back to take a sip. Mystified, she watches his adam’s apple bob up and down before he wipes the top of his lip with the end of his sleeve, his eyes flicking up to meet hers again.

Clarke realizes she’s staring, her heart tripping over itself in her haste to look away, first at Wells — clueless, fucking around on his phone — and then back down at her drawing. They’ve never needed Wells as a buffer before, but maybe it’s good, while they get acclimated to each other again. Having sex with Bellamy has turned her into this hormonal, depraved version of herself. She knows that particular door is cracked, and she’s having trouble not kicking it all the way open. It’s just a lot, going from daily texts to seeing him in person.

She gives it thirty more seconds before she closes down the Adobe Sketch app, putting her iPad on her nightstand as she moves to Wells’ side of her king sized canopy bed, patting the mattress beside her. Clarke looks directly at him, making sure he knows she’s being normal about this, “Come on, let’s watch something stupid.”

“I have a list,” Bellamy smiles, bringing over her laptop from the desk as he settles in on her other side. Not close enough that they’re touching, but definitely close enough for her to know he’s being normal about this, too. 

“It’s my turn to pick actually,” she retorts pointedly, swiftly ripping the laptop from his lap. He’s already logged in, so she opens her browser, clicking her Netflix bookmark. 

Wells scoffs, not even looking up from his phone. She hopes he’s texting a girl, now that him and Luna have called it quits, but when she glances over he’s playing WordFeud. Typical. “There’s no way you remembered what we watched three months ago.”

“It wasn’t three.” She halfheartedly smacks him in the chest with a pillow she removes from behind her back to get more comfortable. “It was last month when we Rabb.it’ed The Hunt and it was you,” she turns to Bellamy, nudging him with her foot, “who suggested it.” She smiles, satisfied. “Which makes it _my_ turn.”

He slowly drags his eyes up from where she nudged him, giving her an unimpressed look along with a mean scowl. “You both said you didn’t care. Now _I_ have to suffer through whatever it is you pick just because both of you are spineless?”

Clarke is just as unfazed as him, narrowing her eyes when she glances over at him before opening her to watch list. “If I were you I’d worry more about the state of your own spine, considering the fact you’re now cohabiting with a snake.”

“God, the way I’ve missed you,” he counters, sarcastically, elbow brushing against her bicep as he crosses his arms over his chest. 

“Yeah, we both know you can’t live without me,” she bites back, angrily browsing through her list to find something he would hate every second of. It’s what he deserves for being an ass. 

“Can you two quit making out and pick a movie already?” Wells jokes, used to their endless bantering, as he turns over to connect his phone to the charger bungling from the nightstand on his side of the bed.

For a moment, Clarke looks at Bellamy, panic-stricken eyes, spine drawn up tight, heart pounding wildly against her ribcage. Then a stupid smile slowly starts to crack across his face, and involuntarily it’s happening to her too, both of them muffling their laughter. 

It’s tentative, and precarious, but it’s good. 

_Still._ She can’t resist. 

“The Kissing Booth 2? Clarke, no fucking way.”

∴

Octavia insists they spent their afternoon swimming in the Griffins’ pool, despite it being early March and still borderline chilly out. Clarke spends the first hour in the hottub, warming up as she watches the three of them throw around a ball. Mostly Bellamy, the bright sun illuminating his skin and bouncing off the glistening water trickling down the grooves of his muscled chest. His stubborn curls flattened to his head, dripping onto his broad shoulders as he smoothly moves around in the pool. He actually looks kind of stupid, she tells herself, it’s why she can’t look away. 

The youngest Blake eventually convinces her to come join them for a game of shoulder wars, calling her a variety of names in the process. She has no real reason to refuse, so she lifts herself from the hottub, edging towards the stairs at the curve at the end of the pool. Octavia is already busy wrestling herself on top of Wells’ shoulders, the two of them distracted with floundering limbs and squeals of delight. Entirely aware that Bellamy’s eyes are glued to all the skin left exposed by her blue bikini, Clarke’s warm skin is starting to feel tight and prickly. 

Wiping his eyes while his adoptive sister is clawing at his head to find her balance, Wells splashes some water in her direction. “Hurry up.”

She makes her way down the stairs quickly, taking a deep breath before dipping herself completely under the cool water. She stays down until her lungs burn, completely conscious of the fact she’s stalling, surfacing with a small gasp as she pushes her hair back from her eyes. Bellamy’s dark eyes are already on hers, and she simultaneously both struggles to keep her gaze on his and to look away.

“Uhm,” she starts to say, when he comes closer, afraid of a lot of things right now—his proximity, the dangerous look in his eyes, her thoughts, the skin on skin contact—and, with a dart of her eyes over to his siblings, she adds a warning, “Bellamy.” 

He doesn’t give her much more of a chance to object than that, already ducking under the water to circle around her. Bellamy darts between her legs, hooking his arms around her thighs before emerging with her perilously balanced on his shoulders. Her fingers steady her by fisting his wet curls as she fights to stay upright, her heart pounding loudly from the sudden rush of adrenaline. 

His hands wrap tightly around her legs, righting her quickly as he spits water off his lips. His head dips back slightly to look up at her, the corners of his lips quirked. “What was it you said, princess?”

Her stomach flips, ignoring the urge to take her time and trace his aggravatingly gorgeous features. Or maybe flick his forehead, for being annoying. “Stop being cute,” she tells him instead, glaring. He knows exactly what he is doing, but she’s yet to figure out the reason why.

“Okay, losers,” Octavia exclaims, evilly. “Prepare to get your ass beat.”

They used to play this game all the time, wasted hours in the sun until they were sore and bruised, and their hair felt mostly like plastic. That was before Octavia grew out of her scrawny pre-teenager phase and they let her win purposely, _before_ she knew what else Bellamy’s hands could do and the feel of them on her legs and knees and thighs wasn’t so goddamn distracting. He’s being a fucking asshole. They both know he can anchor her way better if he holds her around the ankles, but if the two of them are playing a different game here, she’s not going to be the one who gives in. 

Clarke is _not_ going to let him even notice she enjoys the way the curve of his skull sits snug against her core, sending a jolt of arousal through her with every move or jerk of his head. It does, however, make her a bad participant in the game, Octavia taking her by surprise more often than she’s willing to admit. The girl is determined to win, and Clarke is determined not to have anyone notice she’s fucking turned on, arousal pooling between her thighs.

By the time they call it quits after she hits the water _again_ , she’s lost count of how many times they’ve actually lost. Of how many times he’s had to yank her back up his shoulders, hands all over her waist, hips, even her fucking ass. She glares up at Bellamy, deservedly so, ignoring the cacophony of cackles behind her as Wells chases Octavia through the water in celebration.

He’s smirking, arrogantly. She knows this is just a game to him. He’s found a new way to tease her, a new button to push, and she’s walking right into it. Making it easy for him, even. “It’s really not my fault you’ve suddenly lost all muscle control.”

Not his fault? She glares harder, making sure to keep her voice down. “There’s something severely wrong with you.”

Clarke freezes as he reaches out to adjust the strap of her bikini, hanging limply from her arm, leaning closer to her in the process. Close enough to feel his warm breath on her face, to have to angle her head slightly back in order to keep his gaze, see that boyish sparkle in them. “I think you’re projecting.”

She’s about to tear him a new one — dangerously high on a cocktail of wildly ranging emotions; angry and horny and _betrayed_ — when suddenly she’s dunked below the surface from behind by a completely unsubtle force that can’t be anyone but Octavia, inhaling a mouthful of pool water. She splutters for air as she emerges, Wells and Bellamy both guffawing like it’s the fucking Comedy Special of the year.

Somebody is about to die, and she knows who she’s favoring.

∴

  
  


Wells has already dipped into the shower by the time Clarke manages to drag herself upstairs and finishes unlacing her sneakers, perched on top of the toilet. She throws them through the open door of Bellamy’s bedroom with a satisfying thud, somehow costing more effort than usual. Fuck, she’s sweaty, she realizes, brushing her curtain bangs back from her forehead. “Do you mind if I use your shower?”

“You realize you live two houses over?” Bellamy counters from his room, annoyingly, voice muffled because of the distance.

“You realize I can’t feel my legs?” Clarke’s not one for running, but occasionally she joins them on their morning jogs, when she hates herself particularly bad that day. She figured she could use it, after months of her diet consisting of shitty beer and cheap fast food, and most of her daily exercise being the walks from one lecture to another.

She hears him scoff loudly, making her roll her eyes. “Use Octavia’s then.”

“No, I want yours,” she protests, voice raised as she unzips her hoodie and shrugs it off. It’s practically stuck to her body, and it makes her huff with effort. “It has better water pressure!”

He appears in the doorway then, tossing his soaked shirt into the wash bin underneath the sink before leaning his forearm against the doorframe above his head. He’s dressed only in basketball shorts now, his bare chest glistening with sweat. Clarke has never had the urge to lick him before, but now she does and she doesn’t know what to do with that information. “So just to clarify,” he asks, dryly, eyebrows raised. “When you asked ‘do you mind if I use your shower’, you didn’t actually care about the answer?”

“Exactly,” she smiles, sugary-sweet, standing up and coming to a half in front of him, her fingers wrapped around the doorknob. In the distance, a shower stops running. “See? Wells is done with his, you can use that one.”

“Can I, now?” Bellamy gruffs, holding her gaze with his flushed, perfect, stupid face. There’s a pulse of something between her thighs, and it forces her to take a sharp breath. 

Speaking of the devil, Wells calls his name from the other room, breaking whatever the hell that just was between them. “You seen my deodorant?”

She purses her lips, teasingly. “Whatever will the two of you do without Axe body spray.”

His mouth twitches, one of those smug looks on his face that makes her want to punch him. “Don’t pretend you don’t spray it on your pillow when you miss us.”

Clarke rolls her eyes, shoving him away from the door before closing it. She shakes her head at herself in the mirror, placing a cool hand against her heated cheek. Honestly, she needs to get laid. Fast. A knock, five seconds later, startles her, just as she’s pulling her shirt over her head. She cracks the door back open, eyeing Bellamy suspiciously. What now?

His gaze dips down to her sports bra, for just a second, and then he’s holding up her bag. “Thought you might need this.”

“Right,” she says, her mouth dry, opening the door wider to take it from him, ignoring the thrill shooting up her spine as their fingers brush. “Thanks.”

Cold shower it is. 

∴

Clarke ends up making the first move. The three of them go to an all you can eat diner, and Wells has so much garlic butter shrimp he feels sick by the time they pull up to the theatre. Sick enough to ditch them halfway through the movie, one he picked out. It’s about time travel, and guns, and requires way too much brain power, and it’s only redeeming quality is pretty much the lead actor who resembles Denzel Washington.

She keeps watching Bellamy from the corner of her eyes, who seems to like the movie well enough, but she’s bored. And sighing dramatically every two minutes, although he doesn’t pick up on the hint. And squirming in her seat, because of the inexplicable arousal settling low in her stomach, pooling between her thighs. 

Well, it’s explicable. She’s found she likes having sex, _really_ likes having it, and he’s pretty good at it. She’s horny all the time now, and he’s unfairly hot. It’s not strange that her mind goes there.

At this point, she’s not even sure what’s holding them back. They both obviously enjoyed it, the last few times. And from the way he keeps ogling her in any way he deems appropriate around his family, he’s still more than physically attracted to her. She can’t fucking stop thinking about it either, now that she’s around him again all the time. It was easy, to push it aside, before, when there were two states and a lot of distractions between them, but now he’s here, all the time, and she can touch him, and talk to him whenever, and _smell_ him, and it’s like everything is heightened. 

She just wants him, bad. She doesn’t think that makes her a horrible person. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Like last time. They could do that again, easily. They’ve wasted days, already, and well. She’s desperate. She’s not ashamed to admit that.

Clarke leans into his space, keeping her eyes on the screen as her fingers tighten around the arm rest in between them. Breath hot against his ear, she whispers, “Can I go down on you?”

His head snaps around to face her so fast, she’s sure he must have pulled a muscle in his neck. The look of absolute horror on his face would be funny in any other situation. He doesn’t even keep his voice down when he snaps, “What?’ 

Someone turns around to shush them, but she sends them an apologetic look, waiting another second before she turns back to Bellamy. She pops a milk dud into her mouth, looking him directly in the eye to show him she’s not backing down. “You heard me.”

“Here?” Bellamy questions, roughly, although he does lower his voice to a whisper this time, raking her face to presumably see if she’s fucking with him or not. 

Clarke shrugs, casually, even though her pulse is racing. There’s only about a dozen other people in the theatre, the nearest a few rows in front of them. “Unless you don’t want me to.”

His face hardens, his eyes flicking to the front for a second before they land back on her. He still sounds unwary, but she can tell his resolve is wearing thin from the way he tightly swallows before speaking. “I don’t know.”

“I’ve only done it once. The guy didn’t seem to like it very much.” He kept shoving her face toward his dick, and when she finally relented, more than once made her gag around him without her permission or obvious enjoyment. Afterwards, he complained about her not swallowing. It wasn’t sexy. This angle kind of works for them anyway, so she tries it, placing a hand on his thigh, “Maybe you could give me some tips?”

Like predicted, implying it’s for her benefit takes some of the pressure of.

Bellamy slowly pushes a deep, resigned sigh from his lips, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. He puts his popcorn in the empty seat beside him, quietly unbuttoning his jeans, which seems like enough of an invitation. A thrill runs through her body as it floods with an exciting warmth, her clit already beginning to pulse in anticipation.

Her eyes flick up to watch him bite down on his lips to stifle a groan as she pulls him out of his boxers, only half-hard in her hold. It only takes a lick of her palm and a few pumps for him to grow completely hard under her fingers, pre-cum dripping down the tip of his cock. His pupils are blown and locked on where she works him over, his breathing ragid before she’s even really done anything but touch him. She wants to kiss him, desperately, but she figures that’s a step too far, and settles on briefly biting at the underside of his tightly clenched jaw on her way down.

Clarke takes him in between her lips, unpracticed and unsure, yet her name softly tumbles from his lips in a throaty groan. “Sorry,” he curses lowly, before adding another hasty, “Sorry,” and she freezes for a moment, with his cock halfway down her warm mouth. She gives it a few seconds to make sure no one’s caught on to what they’re doing, but after a lack of disgusted gasps or Bellamy discreetly trying to push her away, she resumes her activities. One of his hand palms the back of her head, the other grabbing tightly onto the arm of his chair as he obviously tries to restrain himself this time around.

Clarke can hardly take all of him, but her hand eagerly works the rest of his cock, whatever of his balls she can reach. She’s watched a few porn videos since her last encounter, for educational reasons, and really the only person she’s imagined trying her new techniques out on was Bellamy. She knows she can trust him to tell her whether or not she’s any good at them.

She enjoys feeling him grow tense underneath her, his hips straining not to buck up towards her face, his breathing hard because of _her_. She looks up at him through her lashes as her tongue swirls around the tip, pressing her thighs together as she watches him tilt his head back, struggling not to make any sounds of pleasure that might arise above the action scene playing out behind her. She’s absolutely in love with being responsible for his demise, addicted to the feeling in the best of ways. He’s always so strong, so in control, somehow always manages to have the upperhand, but like this, at her mercy — he has no choice but to let go.

Despite her lack of skill, it doesn’t take Bellamy long to reach the edge around her tongue. He starts softly tugging her away just before, but she stays in place, letting him release his come into her mouth. It’s a little salty, heady, but she doesn’t mind the taste all that much. Besides, it’s the less messier option when they’re in the middle of a theatre. 

_They’re actually in the middle of a theatre._ A little giggle of relief and excited disbelief escapes her lips as she sits back up in her seat, increduled by her own actions but finding it incredibly hot at the same time. She can’t believe she just did that. And with Bellamy, too. 

Clarke sends him an anxious smile once she finds him watching her, wiping her wet mouth with the palm of her hand. One of his hands works to stuff his cock back into his boxers, and like he possibly can’t wait a second longer, the fingers of his free hand come up to weave into the hair at the back of her head, pulling her close enough to crush his lips against hers. He deepens the kiss, hot and needy and _filthy_ , her entire body buzzing with want. The last guy wouldn’t even kiss her afterwards, said it was gross. At this point she doesn’t even know why she bothers with anyone else.

He’s panting once he pulls back, kissing her forehead before pulling back his other hand to help re-button his pants. “You don’t really need any tips, that was perfect.”

“Are you just saying that because I’m your best friend?” She whispers back, voice still rough from what she just did, all the adrenaline still coursing through her veins.

He sends her a pointed look, lips parting indignantly. “You know me better than that.”

It’s quiet for another second as both of them turn back to the screen and catch their breath, try and process what the hell they just did. She worries her bottom lip, knowing that they can’t keep avoiding this conversation. Just because they don’t talk about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. 

Her fingernails bite into her palms as she takes a deep breath, looking back over at him, desperately needing to be on the same page with him. “We can have fun together, you and I, right?” She doesn’t mean to sound small, or unsure, or entirely too hopeful, but it’s the way it comes out, and she can’t take it back.

He fights a smirk, reaching out to thumb away a spot on her chin. “Who are you and what have you done with Clarke?”

She opens her mouth to tell him to fuck off, but then his thumb digs into the spot above her lip to pull her back, kiss her again. She suspects it more to shut her up than anything else. “We can have fun,” he agrees, smiling, soft enough to be serious, relief washing over her. It’s just so easy, so simple with him. He always understands her, like no one else does. His eyes dip down to her thighs, still pressed together tighty. “Want to get out of here so I can help you out with that?”

“Definitely.”

∴

“I don’t like this,” Clarke tells him, her face scrunching up as her hands tighten in the sheets in front of her, trying to hold up her own weight. This angle is wrong, and her wrists are sore, and she wants to see him, _feel_ him.

“Okay, turn back around,” he suggests, pushing her hair over her shoulder to press a kiss in between her shoulder blades, before pulling out of her and moving away from her back. Once she lays back down, he crawls on top of her, lifting one of her knees higher, watching her face intently as he sinks back into her. “How about this?”

“Better,” she pants, clawing at his back as she closes her eyes and tries to lose herself back into the feel of him, of their hips meeting each other, of the sweet kisses he’s pressing against her jaw. She can’t _really_ , knowing they have limited time, now and always, and they could be doing something she’s wanted to do for a while now. She sighs. Clarke squeezes his shoulders with both hands, blinking her eyes open to shoot him an apologetic look. “Sorry.”

Bellamy sends her a weird look in return, resting on his outstretched arms so he can look down at her properly. “Don’t apologize.” His eyes run down her body, presumably to check if maybe she’s uncomfortable. “What is it?”

Her mom is off with Kane to some hotel for their anniversary, and for once Wells didn’t ask to join her and Bellamy for their made-up evening activity — an evening hike — called it a ‘your people activity’ to Clarke’s face and claimed he had an essay to catch up on before the week ended. They have her house to themselves, and they have time, yet it’s always limited, close to running out, stolen moments before inevitably they have to return to the real world, or someone comes looking for them. 

So she just wants to make the most of what little time they do have, to try as many things as possible, to find new ways to be close to him, _have fun_. Clarke runs her hand over his side, offering him a sheepish smile. “Can we try something else?”

He does a really good job at making her feel safe, and obviously, Clarke is usually a confident person, but when it comes to sex, most of the time she’s still trying to find her footing. There’s a lot she hasn’t done yet, and certainly he hasn’t done everything either, but she thinks that together they could definitely get there. He isn’t some perfect-all-the-time, all-knowing natural-at-everything sex God, but he’s Bellamy, and she figures she’ll like doing most stuff with him anyway. And if she doesn’t, he _wants_ her to tell him.

“Sure,” Bellamy relents, laughing a little as he rolls off her, giving her a curious, expectant look. 

“I wanna be on top,” she forces herself to say, scraping her throat afterwards. More self-assured this time, she presses, “Can I be on top?”

“Obviously,” Bellamy gruffs, already hoisting himself up and settling back against her headboard. She crawls back over to him, spreading her thighs over his hips. With her bottom lip tugged in between her teeth, she looks down at his hardness for a second before starting to position herself over him.

“Hold on,” he breathes, pulling her hands away to nose at her jaw, brief, kissing her cheek.

She looks at him in horror, tensing. “I’m not doing it wrong, am I?”

“No, just—” He struggles for a second, frowning, then just palms her face to hold her in place as he slants his mouth over hers. Clarke wraps her arms around his neck to pull him closer, opening her mouth wide to let him lick his way into it, swallowing her sigh. 

They continue like that for a while, until her body starts to grow impatient, jittery with anticipatory energy, and she’s reaching back in between them, shifting her hips forward to sink down on him until he’s fully sheathed inside of her. This causes her to jerk away from his mouth with a small gasp, straightening her spine as she adjusts to the slight pinch in her core. Every time she thinks she’s used to it, she’s proven wrong.

He inhales sharply, fingertips digging in her thighs, as he kisses his way down her neck. She feels the suction of his wet mouth around her nipple, weaving her fingers through his hair to keep his head in place. Once he starts using his teeth to tug on the hardened bud, she’s forced to stifle a groan, hips rocking against his. 

“Yeah, that’s good,” she hums, struggling to keep her eyes open. She swivels her hips some more, before letting off his hair to plant her hands on his shoulders. 

Bellamy lets her set the pace, every now and then thrusting up into her in response to a particularly tortuous movement, mostly focusing his attention on her chest. There’s an almost painful strain on her thighs, and her hair’s plastered to the back of her neck from sweat, but God, this way he’s rubbing over a spot she really likes, and it’s so, so good. 

“God, you look so sexy like this,” he murmurs against her neck at one point, breath warm against her racing pulsepoint. A happy warmth blooms low in her belly at his words.

On one enthusiastic rock of her hips, he accidentally slips out, and they both grunt when she slides back onto him, grasping his shoulders firmly. _Fuck._ Her head tips back, his teeth nipping at her shoulder before he starts peppering wet kisses all the way up the column of her throat, right up until they’re kissing again. As soon as his hand slips between them to work over her clit, she arches her spine, ripping her mouth from him to bite down on her lip in a silent scream. Her hips buck and squirm against his hand involuntarily, her nails sinking into his shoulders meanly as she comes around him. 

Clarke melts into him completely, boneless from her orgasm, her skin hot all over. He thrusts up into her a few more times before he’s stiffening beneath her, too, burying his head in her shoulder. 

After a few moments of tentative recovery, she slides off him, spreading out on her stomach. She closes her eyes briefly, feels him move to probably get rid of the condom before he appears back at her side, draping half of his body over hers. Bellamy presses his mouth to her forehead before laying his face down inches from hers, getting her to blink open her eyes as his hand leisurely moves her hair away from her face and neck, stroking her shoulder and down her arm.

It’s nice. Makes her think of stupid things. Of the other people who don’t measure up, of other people who’ve touched her, and don’t make her feel nearly as good, and him. Makes her bring it up in the strangest way possible. 

She smiles, letting out a small snort of amusement. “You know I had sex with this other guy.”

“Hmm?” He answers, distracted, although his hand freezes briefly on her tricep, just a second, before picking it back up.

“Cillian,” she surmises, dryly, eye-roll heavily implied considering she has no strength left to actually do it. A huff of laughter spills from her lips, even though it makes her entire body hurt in the process. “He was genuinely rubbing my urethra, and when I tried to help him out, he slapped my hand away.”

Bellamy scoffs, eyes flashing up to hers as his brow furrows. “Sounds like an ass.”

The air around them has suddenly grown tense, and Clarke isn’t sure why, so she gives it a moment of silence. “What about you?” She soldiers on eventually, keeping her gaze on his face as his fingers start tracing her shoulder blades, outlining the curves down her spine. There’s not much to see, his eyes fixated on the movements of his hand, the rest of his face a blank slate.

“What about me?” His nostrils flare slightly with the implication. “Am I not a complete idiot, unable to locate a girl’s c—”

She actually does roll her eyes now, cutting him off with a surprisingly gentle voice, not entirely sure where all her earlier bravado has gone. “Who have you been having sex with?” 

Clarke’s also not entirely sure why her pulse lurches, dread weighing her down to the bed. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” he brushes her off tersely, still not looking at her but only her back. It’s one of his most obvious tells, unfortunately.

“You don’t know?” She echoes skeptically, pushing herself up on her elbows to take a better look at him, knocking his hand off her back in the process. Does he think he’s going to hurt her feelings or something stupid like that? She’s the one who asked, she can handle whatever the fucking answer is. 

“I don’t know,” Bellamy repeats with enough certainty to convince her he’s simply not going to tell her no matter how many times she asks. He’s annoyingly stubborn like that.

“Jesus, I didn’t know it was that bad,” Clarke huffs, plopping back down onto the bed with a scowl on her face. If he can’t even keep count at this point, it really must be nearing the hundreds by now. It’s not like him to be embarrassed, or unfairly defensive, not with her. It’s not like she’s an idiot, or a prude. She _gets_ it. Sex with new people is exciting and invigorating in other ways, but she quite likes being able to familiarize herself with him, his body, what he likes and doesn’t like, the feel of them, together. She doesn’t really have that with anyone else. 

Maybe he does.

That’s okay, she tells herself, even if something heavy lodges itself in the back of her throat, and her belly cramps at the way he’s acting. The atmosphere around them suddenly feels tense, uncomfortable. Cold, and distant like him. She wishes she’d never asked. It wasn’t even a big deal. She was just—curious.

“Does it matter?” Bellamy finally grumbles after a minute, in that voice of his that suggests he’s apologetic, but too headstrong to outright say it.

“I guess not,” she says, brisk, not ready to give in just yet. 

He sighs, heavy, pushing at her shoulder until she relents and rolls over, sending him a weird look. His brown eyes soften, palming her cheek as a puzzled look takes over his face. Robotically almost, he leans up to crush his mouth against hers, hard. Clarke’s lips remain slack under his, her eyes narrowing stubbornly as she looks up at him. Still, he keeps at it, pressing his mouth against hers, pushing closer, until there’s something quivering inside of her, and she has no choice but to melt into him, eyes sliding shut as she reluctantly gives into his insistence, kissing him back.

It’s all it takes for him to roll on top of her more completely, his tongue pushing into her mouth as their mouths twist together more urgently. His other hand comes up to cup her cheek, too, Clarke gripping onto his wrists just to have _something_ to hold on to. 

“Did you like it?” Bellamy wonders, out of breath, staring down at the dazed look on her face. She isn’t sure what the hell that just was, but has half a mind to remind him later he can’t kiss her every time she’s mad at him. “Being on top?” She nods, minute. Obviously she liked it, a lot. His mouth twitches with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, telling her he’s not entirely there yet either. “Then we should do it more often.”

Fully well knowing that tomorrow is Sunday, and that she’s flying back early in the day, she still agrees. Maybe it’s his fucked up version of compromise, promising to screw her the next time they see each other, regardless of the personal circumstances. “Sounds like a plan.”

He kisses her again, just as hard and insistent before, as if desperate to remind her of something. If only she knew what, she thinks, blinking up at his red, kiss-bitten lips. “Good.”

Clarke smiles, slow, tentative, her hands shifting down to his forearms. “Well, not _every_ time, because it was really tiring.”

“Obviously,” he matches her smile. “I wouldn’t want you to break an actual sweat.”

∴

Clarke came to say goodbye, only to find Wells and Octavia are out, trying to find a pet store that’s open on Sunday and sells a dinosaur egg shaped hideout for her pet snake. She saw one online and decided she needed to have one, now. 

Bellamy is still in the shower, so she occupies herself making the breakfast she skipped out on to make up for lost time sleeping after a tiring night. Since the two teenage boys raided most of the fridge in the week they were here, she has to settle on a bowl of dry cereal and half a banana. 

Lifting the first bite to her mouth, she jumps when a pair of arms slide around her waist, pressing her back into a broad chest. Her heart rate speeds up and anxiety pumps through her veins briefly — before she recognizes the feel of him, the rumble of dark laughter in his chest, and his scent — relaxing back into him. 

“Bellamy,” she chasitizes, trying to turn in his hold, but he only tightens his grip. 

“Hey pretty girl,” he greets, his curved mouth against her ear. 

“Hey,” she humours him, repressing a shiver as he kisses the back of her neck, nosing aside the baby hair that’s escaped from her braid. Want burns fast and hot low in her stomach against her permission.

“Aren’t you glad I got my sister that pet snake now?” He quips, nipping at her earlobe teasingly.

Warily, she presses, “What do you mean?” Her eyebrows pinch together in mild confusion, but as soon as his hand slips under the waistband of her yoga pants, it starts to make sense. Her hand folds around his wrist, halting his movements. “Theo is in his office.”

Bellamy brushes her off with a dry scoff. “You know how he gets.” Yeah. She does know. Laser focused, like his adoptive son trying to wrestle his hand into her pants right now.

“Still,” she presses, although her eyes flutter closed as he mouths his way down her neck. 

“I guess you’ll have to be quiet then.” And then she really has no chance but to give into him, his fingers slipping underneath her panties to part her folds. Her hands fly out to the counter to brace herself as his fingers curl inside of her, her back arching into him in pleasure as she wantonly presses back on his hand.

It doesn’t take long for her to tremble with her orgasm, her breaths coming in fast and shallow. It’s a miracle she’s even still standing, and Clarke thinks it’s starting to become a problem, how much the thrill of the possibility of being caught manages to turn her on. 

Clarke can feel his smile curve against her heated cheek before he presses a kiss there. “Call it my going-away present for you.”

She leans back into him, running her fingers over his forearm. “What about yours?”

Bellamy withdraws his hand from between her legs, holding them up to her mouth. She obliges, opening up for him so he can push his wet fingers inside for her to suck clean.

“Yeah, I’m good,” he notes, wryly. “I’ll be getting off on that for weeks.”

┇

It takes a while for them to come up with a legitimate excuse to see each other, without inviting Wells along. It’s always been the three of them, and usually where one of them goes, so do the others, even if it’s just a lousy roadtrip across the country for no good reason.

There’s a long weekend before Memorial Day, and Wells has to stay at his fancy Ivy League to finish a Political Science project, while Bellamy pretends like he wants to check out Clarke’s campus for a possible transfer so they’re sure Octavia doesn’t try to tag along either. 

It’s only been two months, but when he knocks on her dorm room, late on Friday night after having driven his shitty truck for hours to see her, she immediately reaches out to hug him. Her arms lock around his neck, throwing most of her weight into him. Bellamy’s weekend bag drops at his feet with a thud, his arms pulling her tight against him. His face nuzzles against the side of her neck, hers buried in the crook of his, pushing up on her tip-toes to breathe him in. Yeah, there’s Axe body spray, and the Jahas’ familiar laundry detergent, but there’s also just something so — _him._ She’s missed him, and it makes her stupidly soft.

She doesn’t really want to let go, especially not when his lips softly start to graze her skin, but then someone whistles from behind them, suggestively, and for a moment, Clarke actually forgot about Josie. 

“So this is the boyfriend?” She notes, in that judgmental condescending yet somehow smug tone only she can, her arms crossed over her chest and one of her perfect eyebrows quirked. Josie’s leaning against the desk by her bed, paperwork and random sticky notes with no real meaning or system to their neon colors scattered all over it. It’s the Type A/Type B roommate combination from hell. 

“Not my boyfriend,” Clarke says quickly, her cheeks flushing an embarrassing pink as she refuses to even so much as glance over at Bellamy, his hand dropping from the small of her back as he straightens to face the other woman in the room. “Josie, Bellamy — my best friend. Bellamy, Josie — my roommate.”

“Heard a lot about you,” Josie smirks with a definite _undertone_ , shaking his hand. There’s a glint to her eyes that Clarke can best describe as Prince Hans from Frozen two seconds before his big evil reveal, and it makes her feel unsettled she isn’t quite able to figure out why.

“Can’t say the same,” he comments idly in return, picking up his bag. Clarke elbows him discreetly, but he just gives her an unruffled look in return like he doesn’t see what the big deal is. He’s usually so good too, about making first impressions.

“Me-ow,” she responds off-handedly and somewhat amused, although she seems relatively impressed. Josie saunters over to her closet, yanking open the door. She taps her chin as if in thought as she scans the clothes piling out, casually dropping, “Are you two coming to Gabe’s frat party tonight or are you going to be too busy platonically fucking all over our dorm?”

“Josie,” she chasitizes with a clench of her jaw, past embarrassment at this point. It’s just annoying. She doesn’t _always_ have to pick up on any and all underlying subtext and make a big deal out of it. Everyone knows she’s double-majoring in anthropology, big fucking deal. She’s a genius. The rest of the world lives to entertain her. Blah blah.

“Party sounds like fun,” Bellamy says, because of course he would think that, sitting down on Clarke’s tiny bed as he observes her belongings with a genuinely interested look on his face. The class schedule tacked to her wall, the pictures of the three of them on her nightstand, the neatly lined markers and perfectly stacked textbooks on her desk, the sweater she stole from him after graduation hanging over her chair. It’s weirdly fitting, to have him here, despite looking so out of place on her blue comforter. He’s so big, so — much. 

“Really?” Clarke surprised. Not that he likes to go to parties, but that he would prefer going to a party than — platonically fucking all over her dorm tonight. 

They never outright said that was the reason he was coming all the way over here, but she thought it was at least subtly implied. They’re good at it. Platonic fucking. The best. She’s been looking forward to it. 

“Yeah,” he says with a little shrug, leaning back on his palms. His voice is strangely soft when he adds, “I want to meet the people you hang out with.” 

Her eyes rake his face intently, a contemplative look on her face as her brows pinch together. They’re usually really good at the whole wordless communication thing, perks of growing up together, but right now he’s not giving her anything. It’s not like she’s opposed to him meeting her other friends.

“Yeah, listen to the guy, Clarke—” Josie mocks, pulling her top over her head without any warning. Wistful, she continues, “This party is going to be so much fun. We could play spin the bottle like last time.” Her brown eyes land on Bellamy, brief but very deliberate. Clarke’s unsure what exact game it is she’s playing, standing there in her tiny pink bra, giving her an angelic smile as if there’s a secret between them, if there even is one. Pushing buttons for no other reason but to push them seems very her. “You seemed to enjoy that.”

“No thanks,” Clarke grits, finding her last bit of restraint wavering. These are just Josie’s regular antics, she knows that, anyone who knows her for longer than a day or has taken even a single Intro to Psych class knows that, but Bellamy doesn’t, and she really — _really_ — doesn’t want to glance over at him right now and find him salivating over her roommate’s rack. So she doesn’t look at him at all. “That was like kissing my sister.”

“We’re going,” Bellamy decides, in his no room for argument voice, dragging her down onto the bed beside him by her wrist. The bed creaks underneath their weight and she immediately leans in to him, although for some reason she still feels severely confused, as if she’s missing part of the conversation. “I get to meet your hopefully more pleasant friends, get drunk on shitty college beer.” He tugs on the hem of her shirt, teasingly, growing a smirk that’s kind of sultry for some reason, " _Plus_ , I get to see you all dressed up.” 

Clarke’s head whips up to give him a strange and puzzled look, wondering what the hell is going on with him, and she opens her mouth planning to ask him since when he cares about what she wears, considering he's seen her covered in vomit before, but then he’s palming both of her cheeks, crushing his mouth to hers. She’s so startled, her body goes on auto-pilot, kissing him back. His mouth is insistent, possessive, filthy, licking into her like he’s got something to prove. He’s never quite kissed her like _this_. Her face feels hot, her skin on fire. 

For a few moments she forgets, lets herself be in the moment, but near the end of it she’s frowning again, confusion running rampant through her system. She’s more than fine kissing him, she loves it really, one of her top three activities to do together, Bellamy’s very kissable, but they’ve never done it in front of other people. It’s another one of those unspoken agreements they seem to have a lot of these days.

She blankly stares at him when he pulls back, to which he shrugs, eyes flicking over to Josie with a smug smirk as he wipes his palm over his wet mouth. _Oh._ Whatever game it was the two of them just played without her, he obviously won. 

Josie winks at her, perhaps even a bit amused by her cluelessness, pulling one of Clarke’s tops over her head without asking or needing permission. “That’s a keeper, babe.”

∴

In the morning they feel like they’ve been hit with a truck, both gone a little too overboard on the drinking games the previous night, but the first place she ends up taking him in their real but cover-up pics or it didn’t happen grandtour of the premises is the library, knowing he’d love the place. 

She sneaks him inside by smooth-talking the librarian technician and he spends a while browsing the place and it’s near empty aisles, fawning over the historical wing and the rare books in the Mythological section. Bellamy spots her stupid smile before she even notices she’s doing it. “What?”

She tries to rail it in, fails terribly. “Nothing.”

“You can’t find these anywhere online,” he says, defensive. 

Clarke knocks her arm against his, fondly pressing her cheek against his shoulder for a moment. “You’re a nerd. It’s cuter if you own up to it.”

“Shut up,” he grumbles, tips of his ears turning a deep red, looking back down at the shiny pages of the book in his hand as if nowadays he can’t even handle being called cute anymore. Then, because why not, he tacks on, “You smell like a frat boy two days post mortem, you know that right?”

“Pot versus kettle,” Clarke counters easily. You know you’ve had a wild night when the booze is leaking from your pores the day after and your mouth perpetually feels like cotton. “Guess you should’ve let me join you instead of making us shower separately after all.”

He scoffs, indignant. “I’m not getting you kicked out of college.”

“I’m a Griffin. I think my mom bought this place a wing after my dad died. I’m practically royalty. They’re not going to kick me out over some shower sex.”

He shakes his head. “Always flashing your generational wealth and insane privilege at me.”

“You have the most insane privilege of us all. You get to have shower sex with me.”

Bellamy rolls his eyes, putting the book back in the empty slot it came from. “Admit you were just too hungover to wash your own hair.”

She bites back a pleased smile. “No comment.”

They get bubble teas from the coffee shop that’s a five minute walk from campus, her treat _and_ her best hidden secret, and eventually wander off to an abandoned souvenir shop for a bit, with lack of anything better to do. Why a small college town even has a souvenir shop to begin with is still a mystery to her, but they have fun.

Clarke pushes a pair of sunglasses back over her hair, idly leafing through the other ridiculous pairs on the stand. The only other person in the shop is an employee, who’s behind the cash register in the back, occupied with his phone. She clears her throat. “You could go to one of these you know?” 

“What?” He asks, absently, still sporting a ridiculous university football team themed blow-up floppy hat as he tries to pick between a selection of keychains to bring back for Octavia. He tried to explain this wasn’t a vacation, but she loves presents, no matter what the occasion.

“You could really transfer,” she clarifies, pretending to read a price tag as if it could tell her even anything remotely interesting. She doesn’t know why she brought it up. It just kind of — came out. He fits in here. He’s smart, and motivated, and so much more sociable than her. He’d thrive.

“Yeah, maybe,” Bellamy relents after a beat, dismissive. Her mood sours for no reason. 

“It doesn't have to be here,” she says, quickly, just in case he thinks she’s trying to manipulate him into being closer to her or something. It’s not about that, or her. It doesn’t even have to be this college, the one she goes to. It could be any, anywhere, if he just allowed himself to want things for himself. Clarke glances over at him with the intention to look away, but his eyes meet hers so she holds his gaze, her eyes softening. “But it doesn’t need to be near Octavia either.”

“It wasn’t—” He starts, heated, probably about to tell her the same list of reasons he gave Theo last year.

A pointed look is enough to cut him off. She knows him, they both know that. “We don’t have to pretend.”

Bellamy casts his eyes downward, his fingers curling around the Massachusetts-shaped keychain in his palm. Anger radiates off him, and she’s not actually sure if she should push this anymore — this weekend was supposed to be about anything _but_ school, and their families, and real life — but she’s started now and there’s no going back.

Her eyes rake his face, careful. “It’s fine. I get — after your mom. You guys went through a lot.” She licks her lips. Octavia aside, she knows it fucked with him in a lot of ways. Not to psychoanalyze her best friend, but she recognizes it in how jealous he gets over anything and anyone, his trust and abandonment issues, his negative self esteem and his subtle but constant need for reassurance and validation. He’s been working on it, sure, but it’s still there. Her fingers fold around his free hand, squeezing softly. “She’s strong, you helped her be.”

After a beat he finally tears his eyes off his balled fist, offering her somewhat of a reassuring smile. “I’ll think about it.”

She slides the heart-shaped glasses back from her head down to her nose. “That’s all I needed to hear.” 

∴

Josie texted her to tell her she’s sleeping over at her on-and-off-again boyfriend’s for the weekend with a string of winky face emojis, so by the time they make their way back to her dorm it’s thankfully abandoned. They’re tired from strolling around all morning and the majority of the afternoon, so they settle in on her bed with her laptop, backs against the wall her bed’s pushed up against.

Bellamy’s complaining about how she still hasn’t caught up on Homeland and how he’s going to have to rewatch with her when her phone buzzes insistently from beside her on the mattress. She turns it around to see the caller-ID before she puts it to her ear with a frown.

“Hey, Wells,” Clarke stammers with a clear of her throat, lifting her head off Bellamy’s shoulder to sit up. She feels him tense beside her before he pushes up from the bed, taking his empty glass with him. Instantly and inexplicably, she feels like she’s done something wrong. 

Her phone buzzes again in her palm, the call being switched to Facetime. “Wanted to show you this new sweater I bought,” someone says, and Clarke suddenly remembers Wells is talking to her, dragging her eyes away from Bellamy as she curls her legs under her, worrying her bottom lip. “It’s for that interview for the internship position with my professor next year. I need you to tell me I don’t look like I’m trying too hard.”

“It looks good,” she forces out, distracted, making herself envision Wells in the maroon sweater as he models it in front of him, his phone resting against something on his desk. It’ll look nice with his eyes. He’ll get the internship either way. “I like the color.”

“Thanks.” He beams with more ease than a second ago, settling back in his desk chair as he carefully folds the garment over his lap. “Bell there?” 

She blinks, for a beat, then actually glances over to Bellamy, but he shakes his head, pretending to be busy getting himself a new drink from the mini fridge by her desk.

“No, he’s in the shower,” Clarke lies, keeping her voice low as she watches him shuffle around the drinks inside mindlessly. Her left side feels cold, suddenly overly aware of his lack of body heat. 

Wells laughs on the other end of the line. “Is he still acting like a grump?”

For a second, it’s like someone’s knocked her in the gut, but she shakes it off, resting her free arm beneath her breasts. “He’s been fine,” she answers, evasive for no reason, watching Bellamy pour himself a generous gin and tonic. An hour ago, after accidentally catching a whiff of someone’s noodles down the hall, he was swearing he’d never drink again.

There’d been some reports, from Wells and Octavia, even Miller. Some friendly ribbing in the groupchat about him being distant and replying late, his sister tagging him in more Get Your Face Fixed memes than usual, drunk Miller highjacking his Instagram story on a night out to make fun of his gloomy attitude. Nothing too serious. She figured it that with school coming to a close in a little over a month it was end of the year anxiety. Stress. Cluelessly making decisions for next year without knowing what the hell you’re doing, slowly starting to say goodbye to friends and habits, classes you’ve paid little attention to all semester finally catching up with you — it would go away eventually. 

And it had. He seemed more than okay, this whole weekend. Until now, she guesses.

With one hand behind his neck, Wells teases, “That’s your effect on him, _princess_.”

“I guess,” Clarke says, glancing back over at Bellamy. He lifts the glass to his mouth, rigidly, taking a long sip and she curls her first around her thumb, pressing down hard enough for it to hurt, uncertain why her chest feels so tight, her stomach is in knots. She feels so — in the dark. What is she missing?

She absently listens to Wells while he fills her about one of his TAs, kind of glad he’s doing most of the talking, knowing she’s too tense to really hold a conversation. Clarke’s relieved when one of his friends pops his head around the door and tells him they’re late for some event minutes later, effectively ending the call. 

“He seems good,” Bellamy comments, and her head snaps up to look at him, leaning back against her desk. 

“He does,” she agrees, because she has no reason not to. 

He nods, minutely, taking another long drag of his drink. The silence that follows is too much, too draining.

“Do you want me to go grab us some dinner?” Clarke offers, already reaching for her shoes at the end of the bed. She’d initially figured she’d order takeout, fine lazing out with him for the rest of the afternoon, but now she’s scrambling to get away. For some reason, guilt is eating her up from the inside, and she doesn’t even know why. 

“Sure,” he nods, _again_ , his face completely blank, and she wants to scream. They’ve left so much unspoken, so much undisclosed, it’s hard to bring up even just anything alluding to it too much. for the first time she wonders if maybe it’s put distance between them too. Usually he’d offer to come with her, but maybe he wants to be alone for a second too. Work through what just happened. _What_ just happened, she doesn’t even know.

Slipping into her shoes, she decides she can give him that.

Clarke expects things to be weird after whatever the hell that Facetime call was, but by the time she comes back he’s acting completely normal. There’s no strange tension, or worrying looks. He’s even sipping on soda. She’s beginning to wonder if she imagined the whole thing, misreading the situation because of her own anxieties and insecurities. Sometimes she’s so out of touch with her own feelings, so fixated on burying them under whatever excuse she can get her hands on, she ends up unconsciously projecting them onto others. 

Since Bellamy is acting like nothing happened, she’s forced to do the same, and although things are comfortable and easy still, she feels there’s a distance between them that wasn’t there before. 

Maybe it’s better this way.

∴

The next day, Clarke comes back from dropping some of Josie’s clothes off at the frat house, per her roommate’s request, to find him still in bed. “Are you still asleep?” She wonders, softly, removing her jacket.

“Lie down with me for a second,” he tells her, flattening himself back against the wall. Her throat closes up with instant fear, but she breathes through it, sitting down on the edge of the bed before stretching out in front of him on her side. It’s a tight fit like always, the two of her in her dorm bed. 

For a long moment, it’s silent. His arm comes up around her chest, and she leans back against him, pressing her mouth against his forearm briefly. He kisses the part of her cheek he can reach, pulling her closer. Selfishly, she wishes he could stay. She’ll always want him to stay.

“Half of the time I don’t know what the fuck we’re doing,” Bellamy confesses out of nowhere, voice thick with emotion, startling her. Instantly, she knows what he’s talking about though.

“Me neither,” she admits, her heart lurching. 

“Wells was right,” he mutters, begrudgingly. “I’ve been in a shit mood since spring break because I can’t stop thinking about you.” Clarke’s breath hitches in the back of her throat, her entire body tensing up although she’s not even sure why. He lets out a huff of frustration. “I haven’t even touched anyone else since New Years.”

“I didn’t know,” she answers, stupidly. Clarke hasn’t thought about it before, wouldn’t let herself lest she comes to a conclusion she really doesn’t want to face. She thinks about _him_ a lot. She thought that was just part of the deal of having sex with your best friend if your best friend is Bellamy. If she slept with someone else, she just pushed those thoughts of him aside. Occasionally found her mind wandering, pretending it _was_ him, but most of the time she just shut that part of herself off. She’s good at compartmentalizing, always has been. It’s not like they decided they wouldn’t, or that she would be mad at him if he did. She didn’t _know_ that was an option. He knows, but full transparency and all, she rasps, “I have.”

“I know. It’s fine.” He sighs, and she wishes she could allow herself to unwrap and analyze all the feelings for him she’s pushed aside and insulated in a safe little space in her mind. But if one card in her carefully crafted house of cards falls, they all do, and she’s not, she doesn’t think she’s ready for that yet. For all of it, the good, and the bad, and the very ugly, scary, messy, to come out. She can’t admit she _would_ care if he slept with someone else without admitting why that is, so it’s better to keep all of it in instead. “I don’t expect you to stop sleeping around with other people, Clarke. I know we’re not—we’re not like that.”

_We could be_ , she thinks, so fast, so insistent, she startles herself. She turns around in his hold, latching into his mouth incessantly, until his warm breaths grow accepting against her lips. “Maybe we don’t need to know what we’re doing,” she pants, nosing his cheekbone. “It feels good, right? We don’t — we don’t have to examine it. We can just — ” Her eyes desperately bore into his, one of her small hands on his cheek. “Have _this_.”

He nods, his forehead against hers before he’s pressing his mouth back against hers. It’s immediately urgent, the kiss, the hands grasping at each other, the need to be closer to him.

In one swift move they’re moving towards the wall so there’s enough space for him to roll on top of her, kissing down her throat. Electric pulses of desire shoot down her spine to swell at her core, his warm breath on her neck making her shiver as her hips buck up against his thigh. It’s not nearly enough. 

When she opens her eyes to look up at him, her stomach bottoms out. His hair messy from sleep and her desperate hands, his broad shoulders caging her in, his mouth red and wet from their kisses. She can’t. “I need—” Clarke stammers, just as he molds his hands around her covered breasts, squeezing tightly. She’s slick with so much desire, it’s unbearable. 

“I know,” he murmurs into her ear, kissing her temple, before backing off her. 

He’s still just in his boxers, so they focus on getting her undressed first. For a second they share a breathy laugh as she almost falls off the bed in their haste to get off her jeans, before he tosses them aside and presses a kiss to her knee, leaving a trail of them on the inside of her thigh, the hard jut of the bone of her hip, the spot above her belly button, the sharp line of her collarbone on his way back to her mouth. Goosebumps erupt on her skin, one hand fisting into the sheets at her side, the other on his side. 

Her legs spread as he crawls back in between her thighs, the way he’s staring into her eyes only making her ache more. His lips part, but she’s kissing him again before he can say anything, reaching for him, pushing his boxers down his ass. The movement of their mouths grows more heated and frenzied, her head lifting off the pillow to seek his tongue out. He feels so good, so right, his weight perfect on top of her as his cock slides into her heat. 

Clarke gasps into his mouth, his hands pinning her hips to the mattress as he pushes all the way inside of her, stretching her open in the satisfying of ways. He stays like that for a moment, buried inside of her, kissing her, slow and heady. It’s only when she starts squirming that he moves again, making her arch against him as his hand slips between her legs, his fingers brushing her swollen clit. 

Pleasure coils tight inside her as Bellamy pumps in and out of her in a slow but relentless rhythm, fingers boring down harder, drawing circles as she claws at his back. Her hips rock up into his in what little space she has to move, and she can hardly keep her eyes open, but she can’t look away from him either. Her breaths come in short and fast, breasts heaving against his chest to push the air in and out of her lungs. 

He pulls his cock out just to push it back in, making her whimper in bliss, opening her legs wider for him. Closer, she always wants to be closer. One more stroke, and she’s coming around him, one hand slamming against the wall beside her head and her back lifting off the bed as the tension finally snaps. Bellamy grunts, and it only takes a few more erratic thrusts before his hips strain against hers, throbbing inside of her, filling her in exactly the way she craved. 

Her stomach twists with dread as the full weight of what just happened settles in on her, their breathing labored as they come back down. Still dazed from orgasm, the horror manages to push through the haze anyway. 

He pulls out of her, squeezing into the tight space between her and the wall before pulling her into his chest. His fingers push her damp her back from her forehead. “You okay?”

Clarke hums softly, resting her face on top of his chest so she doesn’t have to look at him. She hopes he’ll write it off as post-orgasm sleepiness. Of all the things to burn on the tip of her tongue as she comes, an ‘ _I love you_ ’ was the last thing she’d expected. “You didn’t wear a condom,” she notes, just to have something to say. 

“Shit, sorry—” Bellamy freezes, his eyes widening. “We can, I can—”

She laughs a little at the way he flusters, forcing herself to act normal. “I’ve been on the pill since I turned fifteen, don’t worry. I trust you.” Her hand folds over his chest, hoping to calm him. If not with words, then with touch. “I got tested a few weeks ago, so you can trust me too.”

He visibly deflates with relief, bending his head down to kiss the corner of her mouth. “I already did.”

“I’ve never done that before,” Clarke admits, thoughtfully, hand sliding up to his neck. She smiles a little, playful. “Another first with you.”

Bellamy snorts quietly. “I imagine it doesn’t add much to the experience.”

“I like it.” It felt good. Like he was marking her, in some way. Something only for them to share, to know. She scrunches up her nose at the stickiness between her thighs, which earns her a chuckle. “Not right now. But in the moment.”

One of his brows quirks. “Is this your way of telling me you want to forgo condoms from now on?”

“Does it feel different for you?”

“A little.”

“Better?”

He shrugs, his hand sliding over her bare hip. “It felt good, there was more friction. Felt more sensitive. But I’ll take you however you’ll have me.”

Her heart lurches in her chest with affection, and she grins at him, knowingly. “It’s going to suck holding out until summer.” 

“Yeah?” Bellamy asks, surprised.

“Yeah,” she echoes, her smile growing in time with his. “I don’t really want to have sex with anyone else either.” She tried, but it’s not the same. And if it’s not the same, what’s the point? They can have this. It’s not like it’ll blur any lines. If anything, it’ll help her keep them straight.

“We still have like—” His eyes dart over to the clock above the door, pushing his weight against her so he can roll on top of her again. “—eighteen hours to make sure you have enough orgasms to get through the next six weeks.”

“You either overestimate how much I get laid, or underestimate your own abilities.”

He gives her a cocky grin. “You know me, I never underestimate myself.”

┇

  
  


The first time she realizes it’s different is right after their summer break starts. 

Luna, who’s been annoyingly civil about her and Wells’ break-up and is very insistent on staying friends, drags them over to a party somewhere down in the suburbs, a kind of welcome home to all the kids back from college for the time being. 

The place is crawling with people by the time they get there, the music blasting loud enough to be heard down the block. Bellamy excuses himself when he sees Miller, and Luna drags Wells off to go play beer pong. Clarke wanders around, making small talk with a few people on her way to find the hard liquor.

Funnily enough, it’s _now_ that Niylah finally notices her. She’s a year older than her, still pretty and gentle in every way, now majoring in Business so she can take over her dad’s company one day, offers to get her a refill. Then when the conversation eventually hits a natural lull, says, kind of suggestively, “So.”

“So,” Clarke repeats, biting back a smile. She loves watching people trying to figure out her vibes. 

She narrows her eyes a little, mock suspicious. “Either you haven’t noticed me excessively glancing down at your cleavage, or I read you completely wrong and you’re unfortunately straight.”

“My jeans are cuffed, can’t you tell?” She jokes, which gets her to laugh. It’s a nice laugh, makes Clarke smile in return with the satisfaction of earning it. 

Clarke _feels_ his gaze on her from across the room, and meets Bellamy’s dark eyes over the rim of her cup, taking a slow sip and it’s harder to swallow than anticipated. Miller is talking to him, but he hardly seems to be listening, completely focused on her.

The other girl touches her shoulder, briefly, pulling her attention back to her. “They’re overalls, so I wasn’t sure if it counted.”

She opens her mouth to reply, but someone else beats her to it. “Can I talk to you for a second?” Bellamy’s suddenly at her side, tugging on her hand. He doesn’t even glance at Niylah, eyes boring into her face as his jaw clenches. Anger radiates off him in palpable waves. 

She sends Niylah an apologetic look, jutting her head at her best friend. “Excuse me.”

He drags her up the stairs without saying a word, shooing some stoner kid away from the bathroom near the back of the long hallway, slamming the door shut behind them. He flips the lock, and then his lips are on hers, his hands on either side of her face as he drags her as close as possible. 

Once her mind kickstarts back into action, she’s pulling back from him, breaking the kiss. “Wells is downstairs,” Clarke argues, half-heartedly, breathing hard, but he’s already turning her around, pushing her into the counter harshly. Her fingers wrap around the side of the sink tightly, already feeling him hard against her ass. 

“I don’t care,” he snaps gruffly, into her ear, combing the stray hairs that have escaped from her bun aside so he can kiss down the tendon in her neck straining as her head tilts to the side to give him more access.

“It was just harmless flirting,” she adds, while he roughly fumbles with the clasps on the front of her overalls. Arousal floods her centre and drenches her panties, her heart pounding loudly in anticipation. She’s never seen him like this.

“I don’t care,” Bellamy repeats, roughly grabbing at her breast through her crop-top before he’s shoving the heavy denim material down her torso and hips with one hand, the other unfastening his own belt.

“I was about to let her down easy,” she reminds him, despite knowing it’s useless, voice strained as she watches him in the mirror, feels him move her panties aside, not even bothering to take them off. _Fuck_. Desire consumes her, commands her.

He roughly pushes inside of her all at one, making her mouth open in a silent cry as her cunt clenches around him, protesting the sudden intrusion. “I. don’t. care,” he groans, punctuating each word with a thrust of his hips.

Her head falls forward, her hands struggling to keep a grip on the counter with the harsh way he’s pounding into her from behind. Usually, she hates this position, but watching him in the mirror like this, she realizes there’s something extremely hot about letting herself be taken, his fingertips bruising her hips.

His hand splays over the low of her back, making her bend over further, her forehead pressing against the hand that flies out to steady herself against the mirror, the change of angle making him a spot that’s especially good. “Touch yourself,” he orders, and when she doesn’t move fast enough, barks it out even louder, arm snaking around her torso to pinch at her nipple through her shirt. Sparks of pleasure-pain shoot up her spine, coats his dick in even more of her juices. “Touch yourself.”

With trouble, she manages to sneak her hand underneath herself, finding her clit through the material of her panties and rubbing it hard and fast, like the way he’s slamming into her. At this point her legs are trembling, and her skin feels tight with unreleased tension. It doesn’t take much for her to come, clenching his cock inside her. Without warning, he stills, spilling inside of her with a loud grunt.

She’s sagged over the sink, too weak to hold herself up any longer. Bellamy turns her around easily, still panting as he presses his mouth to hers, hard. His fingers slip between her folds, and despite the fact she’s twitching from oversensitivity, coaxes another smaller, softer orgasm from her easily, lips never letting off her. Her head is spinning when he does finally pull back, his fingers pushing their combined come back inside of her as he holds her gaze with dark eyes. “Don’t clean that up.”

She just gapes at him, bewildered, lets him slide her panties back in place before she silently watches him shut the door back behind him to presumably disappear back downstairs. Clarke can’t follow him down yet, she realizes as she pulls her overalls back up and fastens the clasps, glancing up at herself in the smear-covered mirror. Her hair has wildly spilled from her bun, frazzled around her head, her damp skin flushed a deep red and her lips pink and swollen. She looks like she just got her brains fucked out. She did just get her brains fucked out. She can’t _think_. He's driving her insane.

It’s not — _friends,_ they don’t act this way, not even best friends, not even if they decided to make their benefits exclusive. She’s not his, not like that, yet the thought of someone else even touching her has him go wild with anger. Has him fuck her in an upstairs bathroom with no real regard of who might overhear. _Fuck_ , he wants her to walk around this party for the rest of the night, his come dripping from between her thighs like it’s some sort of incentive to keep her from fucking anyone else. A mark. And _shit_ , it turns her on.

He doesn’t own her, but for the first time she realizes that she wants him to.

∴

Octavia practically jumps out of the car before it comes to a stand-still, racing for her charger like her life depends on it. Her brother shakes his head, watching her run off towards their home as he shuts off the engine. Clarke tugs her bag up from by her feet and into her lap, with her other hand she rubs her neck underneath the bikini strap digging into her skin, tense from a long day at the lake. 

Bellamy shifts so he’s facing her more, his elbow leaning on the seat beside her shoulder as he brushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Her still damp hair is pulled up messily, her nose and forehead red from the sun despite the constant appliance of sunblock throughout the day and she probably smells like sweat and lake water. Yet he smiles, and says, “You’re so fucking beautiful.”

She turns her head to look at him, rolling her eyes despite the corners of her mouth stubbornly fighting their way up. “I know. You never used to tell me this stuff before you saw me naked.”

Although she’s certain the strand of hair is in place by now, he keeps making the same movement, which ends up being kind of soothing, grinning like an idiot. “I internalized it, like a normal person.” 

“Ah, right,” Clarke deadpans, fond smile slipping through anyway. “I forgot you only compliment your reflection in the mirror.”

“And people I’ve seen naked,” he teases, earning himself a huff of begrudging laughter. His hand lets off her ear, briefly cupping her chin before dropping it to her shoulder, fingers just grazing the string of her bathing suit. A shiver runs down her spine, sending her skin buzzing. “Seeing you in that bikini all day was torture.”

Clarke was secretly so relieved when Wells said he made plans with his old team from Chess club, but then last minute Octavia decided to tag along anyway, spending the whole day on her phone and hogging Bellamy. It’s not even like she could complain, since she’s his sister.

“Well, now that we’re finally alone—” She starts, suggestively, her eyes dipping to his mouth. He’s already starting to lean closer, licking his lips, but then there’s suddenly a rap of knuckles against the window, startling them and causing them to fly apart immediately.

“Yo,” Wells greets them through the window, leaning his forearms against the door, so he can make eye-contact with Bellamy, casually, like her heart isn’t trying to hammer away her rising panic. Did he see? “Dad needs help carrying the new loungeset into the backyard.”

“I’ll be right there,” Bellamy dismisses him, evenly, spine drawn tight with tension. Wells smiles over at her with a jut of his chin and a raise of his hand before turning around and starting back for the house. She pushes out a shaky breath, her shoulders sagging with relief.

His hands slide in his hair instantly, tugging with frustration before shaking his head in disbelief. “That was way too fucking close,” he curses, checking his sidemirrors paranoidly to see if Wells is actually out of earshot.

Clarke licks her lips, realizing that more than relief, or the thrill of getting away with it, she feels tired. So fucking tired. Of lying all the time, of sneaking around and having to hide the way she feels about him. The solution is so easy, so simple, and she is so, so tired. Tentatively, she covers his knee with her hand. “We should tell him.”

“No,” he blurts out, his head whipping back around to look at her. His wide eyes dart down to her hand as if her touch is foreign, so she quickly retracts her fingers, gritting her teeth together.

Going down this road is useless, she can see it in his eyes. She could list pros and cons, but he’s already made up his mind, and he’s too stubborn to change it. Instead, she tries a different angle, softening, “Why can’t we just be together?”

Bellamy glares at her, in a way she can best describe as resentful, knuckles turning white as his fingers ball into fists on top of his thighs. His nostrils flare, briefly, the look in his eyes making her skin prick with unease, paralyzing her right on the spot. “You know _why_.”

Her heart leaps inside her throat, her face twisting with confusion as a nameless dread weighs her down. What is he talking about?

“Clarke,” he rasps, pained, tears shimmering in his eyes. “He’s in love with you.”

No. She stares at Bellamy, her blood freezing in her veins and numbing her down. Yet, looking at him, seeing the certainty on his face, a part of her recognizes it to be true immediately. Wells loves her. He is _in_ love with her.

Suddenly everything falls apart. Her world stops turning, then goes into reverse, her stomach churning as she swallows tightly. _Wells_. She didn't know. Of course she didn't know. He's been at her side since she was a baby, they've grown up together, seen each other at their best and their worst, but she never thought they were anything more than friends. Best friends. Like her, and Bellamy, but so, so different in so many ways. All this time she's tried so hard to keep the house of cards intact, that she missed an entirely different stack right there in front of her. 

She inhales shakily, raking Bellamy's face, and finds that it doesn’t change anything, that she doesn’t care if it _does._ What does that even have to do with the two of them? So what he loves her? Is this some weird alpha male thing, a fucked up misogynistic pissing contest, did Wells call dibs in tenth grade, or—the longer she looks at Bellamy, the more it dawns on her.

She knows him. She was just too blind to piece it together sooner, to see how deep this truly runs for him. It’s not about her, or him, or the two of them together. It’s about Wells, about Theo. He thinks he’s in debt to them, for what they did for him and Octavia. It probably all leads back to her, to what he desperately wished he could do for her, but couldn’t, and they could. “You don’t owe him anything.” He's not responsible for Wells' feelings.

He’s shaking his head, resigned and self-sacrificing and so fucking stubborn, and something snaps inside of her. She doesn’t fucking love him back. _Wells_ is not who she loves. “Bellamy—”

“Don’t,” he cuts her off, voice rough, his cheeks wet. “Please.”

Her hands twitch in her lap, but she resists the urge to reach out for him the way she wants to. She can’t be wrong about this, she can’t be. Desperate, she pleads, “You love me too, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Bellamy relents bitterly, wiping at the tears with the palm of his hands angrily. “I’ve loved you since I was thirteen.”

“I love _you_ ,” she presses, her breathing ragged, her fingers trembling. Her entire chest feels like an open wound, like it’s been ripped open for other people to laugh at the mess inside. She’s so stupid for not realizing it sooner, for not seeing the truth for what it was, for denying it to herself. “I love _you.”_

Instead of relief, or joy, there’s just a wounded expression on his face. It twists with horror as raw panic floods his voice, more tears running down his cheeks, “You can’t tell him, okay?” She wants to fight, argue, scream, but the expression on his face is distant, wild, as if he’s already there in the future where they know, stuck in his own reality, desperate for her to see it too. Clarke’s heart breaks right there in her chest, aching for him, for them, and once his shoulders start to shake with silent sobs, she allows herself to wrap her arms around them, pulling his head into her chest. “You can’t.”

“I won’t,” she promises, her eyes glossing over with tears of her own. 

Bellamy pulls back from her, and that wild look, it’s still there, and it, he reminds her so much of that thirteen year old boy she used to know, the one who’d accidentally wake her up with his nightmares in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep. Who she stayed up with until first daylight, just listening to each other breathe, or Wells’ snoring, or the wind rustling the trees outside. “We have to stop. We have to stop doing this.”

It’s like a punch in the gut, her stomach churning with nausea as panic surges through her. 

“No,” she demands, her voice shaking, but still resolute like she’s never been before. She refuses. She can’t agree to this. They felt safe, so they got sloppy, but they can be more careful, they can still have this, they can make it work. “Just—” Clarke tries, taking his face in her hands, pressing her forehead against his so he has no choice but to look at her as she speaks, tasting salt, his, hers, theirs, she doesn’t even know. She half-registers her bagging dropping down to the floor with a thud. “I won’t tell him, okay? He doesn’t have to know.” 

She waits until his eyes stop darting around erratically, actually looking into hers, nodding once, and then twice, and then frantically, before she lets herself breathe, a little tiny seed of hope blooming in her chest as he allows her to weave her hand through his.

This can be enough. It has to be. 

∴

Bellamy insists they’re extra careful, which means he doesn’t even allude to so much as being able to tolerate her unless he’s absolutely certain that they’re alone. He's always been dramatic like that. Wells asks her what’s up with the two of them one time to which Clarke answers a simple yet effective ‘ _nothing_ ’, and Octavia seems secretly pleased. Even her mom seems to notice, and her noticing anything these days is a miracle, after he and Wells come to hang out at her house one Thursday afternoon. 

“Are you and Bellamy fighting, honey?” Her mom pries, over dinner, pouring more wine into Marcus’ glass.

Clarke swallows her bite of asparagus slowly, trying to buy herself time. She takes a sip of water next, clearing her throat. “No,” she says simply, figuring the less she lies the more believable it is. They’re not really fighting. At least, she doesn’t think they are. “Why?”

“I think that boy hasn’t said a word to you all afternoon,” she recounts, delicately cutting up the vegetables on her plate. “The last time that happened—”

“I scraped the side of his truck, yeah,” Clarke fills in, affectionately smiling to herself at the memory. Even back then it only took him a day and a half before he cracked. She maintains she didn’t see that lamppost to this day. After a beat, she sighs, mindlessly moving her food around on her plate. “It’s just..” Her mom is one of the only people who can see through her lies, so she sticks to a version of the truth, even if it makes her inwardly cringe. “Girl stuff.”

“Girl stuff?” Abby’s eyebrows raise, swallowing hastily as she exchanges a dubious glance with Marcus. “Is it about you… being… do you...”

It took a while for her mom to get used to the idea of her only daughter being bisexual, and to this day the word isn’t outwardly said but rather danced around, hence exhibit A, but last year she bought a rainbow pin for her doctor’s coat and she’s been sharing posts about biphobia on Facebook for all her friends to see, which is a huge deal for her mom. She tries in her own ways, and it warms her heart.

Besides, Bellamy and her couldn’t have a more different taste in girls, so really, it’s kind of hilarious. Clarke decides to take mercy on her mom, rolling her eyes fondly. “No, not like _that_. We are just in disagreement over the way he’s treating a… girlfriend.”

It actually kind of hurts her to say the word out loud, and as soon as she does she realizes maybe she is more upset about the situation than she’d been telling herself. She knows he’s overcompensating, scared to dead anyone will find out, but she misses him, despite him being so close. It sucks.

“Really?” Marcus pipes up, surprised. “Bellamy is usually so respectful.”

Clarke bites back a snort, her fingers tightening around her fork as she gets an involuntarily flash of him bending her over the bathroom counter. “He is,” she agrees, not willing to ruin his reputation with her parents. Finally she decides on, “He just—can’t make up his mind.’

Marcus nods, offers her some psycho-babble bullshit about indecisiveness in orphan teenage boys which allows her mother to segue into asking him about his new campaign point for troubled youth, leaving it safe for Clarke to text her best friend under the table, pretending to listen. 

**Clarke [06:55 PM]**

_Everyone thinks we’re on bad terms_

**Bellamy [06:58 PM]**

_I know_

_Octavia actually came into my room to talk to me about it_

**Clarke [06:58 PM]**

_Your room? Over the threshold?_

**Bellamy [07:00 PM]**

_Yep, sat down on my bed and everything_

**Clarke [07:01 PM]**

_Jesus christ_

He’s typing and then not, and then typing and not. Her mom laughs way too hard at a joke. Clarke glances up, forces herself to smile at Marcus before gulping down half of her water.

**Bellamy [07:04 PM]**

_I’ll try to do better, okay?_

She worries her lip, her thumbs hovering over the keyboard. She knows it’s hard for him, too, she does. It’s not an ideal situation, not by far, but maybe she can convince him to ease off just a little. 

**Clarke [07:05 PM]**

_Come over in an hour_

_Tell them we’re talking it out or something_

_I’ll be on the roof_

**Bellamy [07:06 PM]**

_I don’t know_

**Clarke [07:06 PM]**

_Say yes or I’ll start sexting you_

**Bellamy [07:06 PM]**

_Is that supposed to be a threat_

**Clarke [07:07 PM]**

_Best case scenario you’re horny with no one to help you out with that_

_Worst case someone accidentally sees a shot of my boobs and you have to make up a story about examining a non-existent mole_

**Bellamy [07:09 PM]**

_I could take my chances_

And then, a second later, 

**Bellamy [07:09 PM]**

_I’ll be there_

He meets her out on the roof above her garage, looking out over the small patch of woods behind their gated community, the only sounds that of the wind and the cars speeding over the highway behind the trees in the distance. She started a sketch, waiting for him, now puts the book aside, smiling up at him.

Bellamy sits down beside her, drawing his knees up to his chest. “Your mom patted my shoulder before I came up.” His eyes follow the long line of her bare legs exposed by her skirt up to her face slowly, raising her eyebrows once he reaches her face. “Said something about me being of two minds.”

“She drank half a bottle of wine at dinner, don’t worry,” she muses, then tips her chin up for a kiss. He leans over to meet her mouth, soft and chaste at first, but soon he’s leaning into her, angling his torso towards her, teasing her mouth open with his tongue, their lips growing hurried and heated, as her hands slide down his forearms to his elbows, pulling him on top of her. 

Clarke drags them up the hard lines of his chest next, body heat warm against her palms even through his shirt, then curls them around his shoulders, tugging him close enough so his thigh is flush against her core. Her clit throbs longingly. 

He breaks away from her, leaning his head back when she chases his wet mouth. Amused, he teases, “I thought we were talking it out?”

Considering she's turned on as hell, talking isn't really one of her priorities right now. She's afraid they'll only end up fighting anyway, and she doesn't want to fight when she could be touching him instead. Her hand palms the back of his head, drawing him closer, murmuring against his lips, “I get it. You’re being careful,” before she kisses him again, which he allows for all of ten seconds before he’s pulling back.

Bellamy quirks an eyebrow, hands on her hips pinning her in place. “But?”

“But nothing.”

“There was definitely a ‘but’.”

_Damnit._ “But—I don’t know?” Her teeth bite down on her bottom lip as she sits up a little, as much as he allows her, begrudgingly confessing it to the asphalt shingles covering her roof. “I just miss you. Sometimes.”

He falls back onto his ass with a sigh, settling in beside her and putting his arm around her shoulder. “You miss not getting off everyday.”

Clarke knows he’s trying to be funny, breaking some of the uncomfortable tension that’s grown around them while treading undiscovered waters, but he asked, so he’s getting an honest answer. She elbows him, hard. “I _miss_ you. You won’t even look at me for longer than five seconds these days.”

A beat, and then he says, genuine, “I’m sorry.” He squeezes her shoulder, frowning at his feet for another long moment as he collects his thoughts. “It’s just—I’m hyperaware of everything I do or say around you now, convinced that it’s showing on my face.” Bellamy’s free hand comes up to pinch the bridge of his nose before his arm drops down, just resting against her lower back as he finally meets her gaze again, smiling self-deprecatingly. “I don’t even know how I kept it in so long before.”

“You’re being paranoid,” she declares, grabbing the hand on his thigh with her own to give it a squeeze. “And I’ll take something over nothing any day, I just think everyone would be less suspicious if you didn’t outright ignore me in public. You’re my best friend. It’s weird.”

“It _is_ weird,” Bellamy relents, pointedly, then his smile slowly dims, his thumb running over the back of her hand delicately. He swallows, his adam’s apple bobbing up and down visibly, his brown eyes reflecting her own inner demons. “I just wonder a lot. If we made the right decision.”

She inhales sharply, ignoring the flash of stabbing pain in her chest and tries to stay rational. He’s more heart than head, so she has to explain it in a way that makes sense for him. “You like being me with me? It feels right?”

His forehead puckers, puzzled. “Of course I do, but that’s not—”

“Would you be okay with it if I started dating other people?”

“No,” he snaps firmly, almost instantly, his jaw clenching. He sharply inhales through his nose, forcing his body to relax. “Do you want to date other people?”

“No,” she objects, intertwining their fingers. “That wasn’t why I asked. If we want to be together, only with each other, and we think it’s worth it, why shouldn’t we?” Her mouth twitches with a hopeful smile, jutting her elbow at his side again, playful. “I can be stealthy. Remember when I broke into the dean’s office to get my dad’s watch back?”

He tilts his head, giving her both a scolding and fond look at the same time. “You have a three inch scar on your wrist from breaking the window. You call that stealth? I told you I could’ve done it during my hall monitor hours, they never would’ve suspected an inside man—”

“My point is nobody ever found out.”

“Because you made it look like the place was ransacked and bribed Monty into hacking the camera system.”

She grins, knowingly. “Exactly.” 

“Fine,” he gruffs, reluctantly, stifling his own smile. Teasing, he adds, “I was really missing getting off every day, too.”

She rolls her eyes, leaning into him with her head on his shoulder, nuzzling his neck as the hand at her back folds around the bare skin of her hip where her shirt’s ridden up, squeezing softly. After a few moments of them gazing out into the distance in silence, she struggles to keep a smug smirk at bay. “That was a fast ‘no’.” 

“Shut up,” he grumbles.

Clarke tilts her head to the side so she can look up at him, arching an unimpressed brow at him. “So you won’t even let me get a beard?”

“I was someone’s beard once, it’s no fun.” At the surprised and baffled look on her face, he elaborates, carefully, “Gina.”

“No way,” she exclaims, shocked.

He remains passive in a way that tells her he wasn’t that bothered by it. “Yeah.” 

“That explains why she wasn’t pushing you about having sex,” Clarke muses, to which he rolls his eyes, unfazed. “Does this mean I can hit her up now?”

Bellamy’s hand moves in between her thighs, until his fingers hit the barrier of her panties. He nudges the crotch aside to dip his thick fingers through her slick folds, pushing two of them inside of her as he nips at her jaw. “What do you think?”

Her teeth drag over her bottom lip, hard, trying to keep herself from letting out any embarrassing noises. He’s looking at her with dark eyes, devouring the sight of her face twisted with pleasure, her shape of her pink mouth stretched into silent sounds. He pulls his wet fingers out and starts circling them around her clit, coaxing a sharp grunt from her lips as her head dips back against his shoulder, rocking her hips in time with his strokes over the sensitive bud. 

She’s sure he can feel her pulse thrum erratically as his mouth drags over the pulse point on her throat, leaving a damp trail. Her moans resound in her throat as her breathing grows harsher, his fingers rubbing her harder, faster, setting a maddening steady rhythm and pattern. “You’re always this wet, princess? Huh? Just waiting for me to touch you?”

_Yes._ Clarke can barely figure out how to form any words, her orgasm approaching fast as her entire body grows tight. He ducks his head down to capture her mouth, and she meets his lips eagerly, his tongue licking over her teeth and the roof of her mouth. Once he pushes one finger back inside of her, thumb pressing down on her clit, she falls apart, trembling and whimpering against him. 

His fingers move through her folds, feeling the oversensitive flutters of her muscles, collecting the wetness seeping out of her before retracting his hand, sucking his fingers into his mouth eagerly. _Fuck, that’s hot._ Clarke watches him with glassy eyes, feeling useless from her release but finding enough strength to lift her hand on top of his thigh, not far from where he’s straining against his pants. “Do you want me to..?’

He shakes his head, kissing her. “No, that’s okay. I should be heading back anyway.”

“When have we ever hung out for thirty minutes?” She argues, skillfully, feeling renewed with energy as she reaches for the button on his jeans. She’s not going to pass up an opportunity to make him feel as good as he makes her, no matter what he says.

Bellamy sighs then touches his forehead to hers, her still ragged pants hot against his mouth. She knows he’s giving in before he even says the words. “You’d make a great lawyer, you know that, right?”

She drags his zipper down, flicking her eyes up at him. “I can’t bribe everyone with blowjobs.”

“God knew you’d be too powerful,” he hisses as her hand wraps around his heated flesh.

Clarke lowers her mouth, giving his dripping head a small kittenlick before looking up at him through her lashes with a knowing smirk. His dark eyes flash dangerously, sending a little thrill of excitement up her spine. “I’m going to stop talking now, okay?”

He lets out a strained grunt as she gets to work. “Sustained.”

∴

Inevitably, Wells finds out. 

He comes home early from a tennis tournament to find Bellamy on top of Clarke on the couch. Tennis is their thing. She opted out of the tournament, only feeling _a little bit_ like an asshole about it. He was way better at singles than doubles anyway, so in some ways she even did him a favor. Time was precious, moments for just her and Bellamy sparser and sparser, and summer would come to an end eventually, and she didn’t want to waste it playing fucking tennis at the country club.

“Sprained ankle, huh?” Wells announces, stunned, his racquet bag dropping down to his feet with a deafening thud. His face is relatively blank, the shock still settling in, but his voice is trembling lightly. “You guys are hooking up?” 

“It’s not what you think—” Bellamy immediately protests, scrambling to move back from her and get up onto his knees, wiping his hand on his jeans. His hair is messy, there’s a red mark from her mouth under his jaw and an obvious bulge in his shorts. It doesn’t look good for them.

“It’s pretty obvious it is what I think it is,” he disscents, somewhat restrained, scrubbing a hand over his mouth before it flies out to the side angrily like he decided that on second thought, he wasn’t going to keep it inside anyway. “For fuck’s sake, your fingers were inside her, Bellamy!”

“We can explain,” she stammers, her fingers straining to quickly fasten the top buttons of her blouse. Her mind races to come up with a valid excuse. Maybe she could claim she wanted practice, which isn’t technically a lie. 

“ _We_?” He echoes, betrayed, dark eyes flicking over to Clarke like he thought she was some little sheep tricked into this arrangement, a bystander in her own life. His shoulders sag and his mouth goes slack, like it’s just now fully hitting him. “How long has this been going on?”

The dead silence following in response is enough of a reply on it’s own, tension growing thicker in the air with each second that passes, but Wells wants more. “I think I deserve some truth.” He scrapes his throat, taking on a wounded expression. “How long have you guys been _lying_ to me?”

Bellamy looks at her, desperate, knowing that if anyone is going to come up with a believable story it’s her, but she closes her eyes, pressing her lips together in a tight line as she braces for impact. “New Years.”

“New Years?” Wells repeats, disbelief coating his voice as he runs a hand over his hair. “This New Years? When you hadn’t even lost—” He cuts himself off, the look on her face apparently enough. His eyes harden, and his jaw clenches before he turns around, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyelids.

“Wells—” Bellamy calls out as his adoptive brother starts to stalk off, already lifting off the couch completely to chase after him.

Clarke licks her lips, tugging on his sleeve. Wells always needs to rationalize things after a fight, get his thoughts back in order to strategically and methodically separate them into boxes and measure them up to his morals and who he wants to be as a person. It’s his thing. “Just give him some space,” she suggests, kindly.

“Some space?” Bellamy scoffs, and then yanks his arm away from her, scrubbing a hand over his mouth. He’s clearly upset and she doesn’t know how to make it better. She doesn’t even know if Wells will ever forgive them for this. His teeth grit together, and for a second she thinks he’s going to walk away too, but then he bites, “I told you. I fucking told you we shouldn’t do this. I told you, but we did it anyway because you kept pushing, and you always get your way, don’t you?”

Clarke takes a deep breath. “You’re being unreasonable,” she starts, steady even when she feels anything but. Everything seems to be slipping right through her fingers. “Please just calm down. We can talk about this—”

“No,” he thunders, cutting her off indefinitely. His chest heaves up and down heavily, a murderous look in his eyes. She’s never seen him this mad. Bellamy’s hands come up, as if to keep her at bay, and this time, his eyes flick up from the floor to meet hers, _and you always get your way_ , and calmer, resigned, he repeats, “No.”

He turns around and disappears off up the stairs, leaving Clarke to sink back into the couch, finally letting the tears fall. What a fucking mess.

┇

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i bend over backwards to force this into a three parter just so i can use the lyrics to 'right where you left me' as a chapter title? leave a comment to find out!


	3. right where you left me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke tries to hate Roma, she does. She tries to hate the way she talks, how placating she is, how nice and kind and inviting and accepting and perfectly tolerable, how she coaxes soft smiles from Bellamy she hasn’t seen on him in years. In the middle of her story about how she’s in college studying to be a kindergarten teacher, she thinks of how the girl’s probably never gone down on him, and finds herself quietly smiling with amusement and some sick kind of satisfaction, and then rails it in, realizing she’s being a literal psychopath. Roma is sweet, she is, she likes hiking and crossword puzzles and baking pies and has this sickenly affectionate look in her eye whenever she watches Bellamy talk. Probably the kind of girl Clarke would pick from a catalogue if she had to find her best friend the perfect girlfriend, if that sort of thing existed. If she looks and is the exact opposite of Clarke, it’s not an observation she makes willingly or stores away to wallow over later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the last chapter will be up next week, promise! it's finished so you can all finally be free of me  
> in my head roma looks like kia from she's the man dont correct me if im wrong
> 
> HUGE HUGE HUGE thanks to maria for being my beta bestie, and of course to meha for absolutely nothing like always.

┇

_part iii: right where you left me_

┇

It’s been a week when Theo personally invites Clarke over for Sunday night dinner. Her mom lets him in, and directs him to her dad’s old study, where she's thumbing through one of his old notebooks mindlessly. He was an engineer, so none of it really makes any sense to her, but it still brings her comfort, to hold a piece of him and wonder what he would tell her if he was here with her now. 

“Like old times,” he adds, kindly, and Clarke weakly smiles at him. The past week has been miserable. She didn’t lose just one friend, she lost two. And Bellamy — he was so much more than that, too. She can’t eat, or sleep, or draw. Even breathing feels like torture these days. She’s heartbroken, and all she can do is try and replay everything over and over and over again, try and make up her mind on where she went wrong. There’s too many possibilities, but she has time. Too much of it, lately.

She doesn’t manage to keep the smile on for long, leaning back against the desk as she hugs the frayed notebook to her chest. However, she does manage to muster together enough strength to tell him, resigned but steady, “I think those times are over, Mr. Jaha.”

“Nothing’s over till the fat lady sings,” he responds, solemnly, patting her on the shoulder. He always figures out a way to be funny without trying to be, a charm to his absurdity. 

Clarke laughs a little, the sound foreign to her own ears. Is that crazy? Is she going crazy? She swallows back tears, looking back up at him. “I don’t know about that.” He wasn’t there. He didn’t see the way Wells was looking at her, the way Bellamy’s hands were shaking. He doesn’t know she can barely stomach her own reflection these days.

“You’ll be fine, Clarke. All of you will be,” Theo informs her, confident, in that all-knowing voice of his he’s developed in his years of being a judge. When they were children, she and Wells would put on his silk black gown, drowning in it, and outlaw stupid, silly things, like birthday parties without cake and rainstorms in the summers and parents dying before going grey and wrinkly. They stopped, when Imane first got cancer, but she never quit hoping. She believed in miracles back then. His brown eyes are kind from under his thick-rimmed glasses, gently pleading. “Just come to dinner.”

_Keep your head up, kiddo._ She thinks her dad would say. _Nobody ever accomplished anything moping._

She finds herself nodding. Maybe he does know better, maybe it _can_ be that easy. Maybe it’s just stupid, teenage drama and they’ll all laugh about it together in a couple of days. “Thanks,” Clarke sniffs, grateful that he is at least giving her the opportunity to smooth things over, make them right. She doesn’t know if she could’ve scraped together enough courage to attempt it herself. If she could even get them to be in a room together long enough. 

Octavia seems the most angry out of all of them. Theo lets her in, and they’re all already seated at the table in their usual spots. Her heart twinges with a nostalgic ache, it’s exactly like any other random Sunday night in her life and yet, it’s also completely different. The air is frosty, no wildly enthusiastic conversations about Scarface or salt bottles being tossed over the table with the intention to hurt, and it’s clear Mr. Jaha pulled fatherly rank to get them to all be here. 

“Can you pass me the bread?” She asks, at one point, quietly, beseeching gaze on Wells’ side profile. She’s not hungry, but it’s her way of trying, of compromising. His lips press together in a thin line, keeping his eyes fixed on his plate. For a second, she thinks he’s actually going to ignore her.

Her pulse jumps with hope when he starts to reach for it with a sigh, but then Octavia beats him to it, grasping the basket in her small hand and passive-aggressively thrusting it her way. Besides Theo, she’s the only one actually looking at her tonight. Well, she’s glaring, but it’s better than being treated like a ghost. “Maybe we should just let Clarke have all the bread rolls.” 

Clarke sits there and takes it, pushing her peas around the porcelain plate silently, mostly because she doesn't want to cause more trouble. And part of her deserves it. She’s not sorry about what happened with Bellamy, but she is sorry for selfishly pushing him, for not telling Wells sooner. She’s the one who drove these wedges between them and now nobody’s saying anything, probably still trying to protect her feelings, and somehow that’s worse. How are they supposed to move on from this if they can’t even talk about it?

Wells sets down the basket on his other side, giving his adoptive sister a pointed look but it’s obvious she’s not done. She’s fuming, and when the Blakes are fuming, they lash out. There’s a bitter, vindictive tone to her voice as she mockingly pushes on,“There’s enough bread rolls for everyone, but we all know Clarke just takes whatever she wants.”

“Cut it out, O,” Bellamy grumbles, sternly, the first thing he’s said all night. He decidedly _only_ looks at Octavia. He looks paler than usual, bags under his eyes. She wonders if he’s been having trouble sleeping too, like her, wishing she could roll over onto her other side and reach out for him. Trace the freckles on the bridge of his nose. Talk about nothing until the sun comes up.

His sister scoffs, a disgusted scowl taking over her features. “Typical.” She shoves her plate away angrily, falling back against her chair with her arms crossed over her chest. “Always picking her side. The knight saving his poor little princess from her own demon—”

Always picking _her_ side? Is she joking? He would do anything for Octavia, they all know that. Clarke is still gaping at her in equal amounts of confusion and disbelief when her brother cuts her off, her blue eyes dragging over to him instead, drawn to the sound of his gruff voice. Everything about him is closed off. His shoulders are tense, his jaw is clenched, his brows pinched together angrily. “I told you, it was nothing. It didn’t mean anything. Wells knows—”

Her world feels like it’s spinning rapidly beneath her chair, sending her reeling as a sharp stab of pain settles beneath her ribs, throbbing. She can’t tear her eyes off him, no matter how much it hurts. Is it a story he’s told all of them, trying to protect Wells' feelings or saving face, or does he actually believe it? He can’t be serious. It meant something. It _did_. When he said he loved her in the car, that couldn’t have been a lie, why would he have risked all of this if it was never real? He has to be hurt and confused and desperate to make things right, that’s probably the reason, but with the certainty with which he said it, doubt is starting to creep into the cracks of her heart anyway. 

Out of her periphery she can make out Wells pointing his fork at him, darkly snapping, “Don’t drag me into this.”

The younger girl’s arms fly up, tossing her napkin on top of her plate as she looks at her brother with pure disgust in her eyes. Blood is still rushing in Clarke’s ears, making everything sound distant and dull as a disquieting unease surges within her. “This is pathetic! She even has you lying to cover for her ass—”

“Octavia,” Theo starts, a warning to his tone, but even Clarke can tell it’s too late. The dam’s bursted wide open, and nothing will be able to keep Octavia from saying what she really thinks, no matter the fall-out.

All it does is turn her attention back on the blonde at the head of the table, disgust quickly morphing into unadulterated, genuine hatred. “You always have to ruin everything,” she spits, giving her a once-over, and Clarke braces herself. She’s been holding this back for a while, so it’s bound to be good. “You’re so selfish. You just do what you want and don’t care who gets hurt in the process.” Nobody is saying anything, just frozen in their seats, listening to her being teared into and it’s humiliating. Her heart is pounding so loudly, she’s sure all of them can hear it, even over Octavia’s loud fury. “If you really loved either of them, you wouldn’t have screwed my brother—”

Something inside of her snaps. Clarke might have unintentionally hurt Wells, but she doesn’t have to sit here and listen to this like this is all on her, like she was the only who wronged anyone, like Octavia has a right to treat her this way while both of them sit there in silence, letting her do their dirty work. If they feel this way, if they think that she wanted to hurt Wells and she played Bellamy, they should come out and say it themselves. But they won’t, because they’d rather pretend she isn’t here at all. 

“It didn’t mean anything,” Clarke breaks in calmly, confirms, deceives, glaring over at Bellamy. He meets her gaze for only a second, pain and guilt flashing across his eyes before quickly glancing away, off to the side, his teeth gritting together. _Coward._ This is what he wants, right? To pretend it was all just a mistake that got out of hand. “It didn’t fucking mean anything and now we’re in this whole mess.” For nothing.

“Clarke, language, _please_ ,” Theo pleads, at his wits’ ends, frigidly putting down his knife and fork.

“No,” she responds with a bark of huffed laughter, then cuts herself off, pressing the pad of her hand to her forehead briefly before standing up, praying her knees don’t give out. She can feel Wells’ worried gaze on the side of her face, can hear his mouth open with the intention to protest, but she refuses to look at him. It’s too late now. “No, I—I think I’m going to leave.” She feels sick, her hands trembling as she runs one of them through her hair, her gaze landing on Theo. “I think she’s singing.” He frowns at her, pity all over his expression, but she gives him a closed lipped smile, straightening out her skirt. “Thanks for dinner, Mr. Jaha, _truly_.”

Clarke doesn’t cry until the front door silently shuts behind her. She half expects one of them to chase after her, but she guesses those days are over, too. 

∴

Clarke drops off the box of their stuff on a day she thinks it’s most likely they’ll be out, and then doesn’t exactly remember how she ends up here, squinting up at the big oak tree behind their house, a thick branch near the top still broken off near the trunk, now just an angry bump, covered up in green moss like an ugly scar. It never recovered from a drenched nine year old Octavia slipping and dragging Clarke down with her.

She hears a soft chuckle behind her, and somehow it sounds like a peace offering. “You were crazy for climbing up there in the middle of a storm.”

“Yeah, well, she was being stubborn and I was cold,” Clarke brushes it off, glancing at him over her shoulder before looking back up at the foliage stretching out and hiding most of the bright blue sky above them, arms banded over her chest just below her breasts. The memory of that day washes back over her. Wells went to get one of their parents, but the clouds were thundering too closely in the distance for comfort, and Octavia was sobbing loudly. She remembered the panic in Bellamy’s eyes before they split up to find his sister, how scared he looked, how she just wanted to make him feel better. How she would’ve done _anything_ to make him feel better. She would have never forgiven herself if his sister was struck by lightning, or fell down that tree and broke her neck. “And you were freaking out.”

“You were always so much braver than me,” Bellamy muses, sort of sadly, like he wouldn’t have done the exact same thing back then, climbing this damn tree to get to Octavia. Clarke just got there first. She could point that out, but it’s bound to start an argument, and she doesn’t want to fight right now. He comes up beside her, arm inches from hers, silent for a moment. Tension rolls off him in waves and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs suddenly, and out of the corner of her eye she can see him pinch the bridge of his nose before bobbing his head a little. “I was angry. At myself. For giving in when I knew better. And I’m an ass for taking it out on you.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, unashamedly, because during all of this she just needed someone. A friend. It would’ve been nice if he could have at least given her that. And she’s hurt, too. Wells hates her now, too. Her whole life is falling apart, too. Her brows furrow together as she goes back over it, pain and anger creeping into her voice despite her best efforts to keep it steady, “It didn’t mean anything? If you feel that way—”

“Of course I don’t — I _don’t_ feel that way,” he presses, making a noise of frustration in the back of his throat, raking a hand through his hair. “But it was easier to explain it to them, to myself. That I was just a dick by mistake, not structurally for over half a year on purpose.” Bellamy sighs, long and drawn out, hesitation coating his rough voice when he speaks next. “And I thought maybe — it would be easier for Wells. If it had been just, I don’t know, hormones getting the best of us.” 

He flinches, and she considers it. She understands the logic behind it, but it still hurt. It still planted little seeds of doubt in her mind that weren’t here before. It would kill her, if all of this was happening because of something that only existed in her head. He’s made her doubt everything, even herself, made her feel like she was going insane.

Clarke finally turns her head to look at him. _Really_ look at him. His unkempt curls, his pale face and wrinkled shirt, the tension in his shoulders. Her mouth feels dry, like she’s fighting a losing battle or abandoning a sinking ship when she states, “But it wasn’t.”

“No. And I tried to tell him that. After the dinner last week.” Unsuccessfully, if his face is to be believed. His eyes soften with guilt, searching hers and all she wants to do is take a step forward and collapse into his arms. “I’ve been trying to come up with an excuse to see you all week. Apologize.”

A breeze sweeps past, ruffling her hair. She tucks it behind her ears, keeping her gaze trained on his face, too afraid she’ll miss something if she doesn’t. “You were mad because I convinced you not to break it off.” That’s what Octavia implied too, isn’t it? That she says the word, and he comes running, against his own will, against his own best interests. That her love is manipulative.

“I was,“ Bellamy confesses, tipping his head back up towards the tree, scattered light filtering through the leaves and covering him in shades of bright yellow. “That wasn’t really fair of me.” He scoffs, shaking his head to himself. “It’s not like I kept accidentally falling with my dick into your vagina.” There’s the hint of teasing smile that falters before he swallows tightly, and it takes a moment of silence as he builds up the courage to look at her again, eyes darting up from a spot below her chin. “I wanted to be with you.”

Clarke nods, silent, facing straight ahead. _Wanted_. 

He sounds strangely upbeat next, like he’s trying to convince himself as much as he is her, “You know I can never stay mad at you, and Wells, Wells will forgive you. He’ll even forgive me. We both know that.” And she does. That’s just who Wells is. She wasn’t worried about that. She was worried about what forgiveness can’t fix, what’s been irreparably broken between the three of them. “He just needs time.” 

After a minute, “It has to be over, right?” She doesn’t mean to plead, it just comes out that way. Despite knowing better, part of her still wishes he would disagree. That he would tell her he is going to fight for them, no matter what. 

“I do love you, Clarke, you have to know that,” he affirms, strained, which might as well be a physical punch in the gut. She hears him open his mouth, then close it, and her fingers curl into fists, nails biting into her palms until it overwhelms the stinging sensation in her lungs. “But loving you only hurts other people.” She struggles to swallow, the back of her throat coated in the acid taste of bile. “Wells hasn’t said a word for two weeks. Octavia won’t even look at me anymore.”

_What about me?_ Clarke wants to cry, and stomp her foot, and shove his chest, but she can barely get herself to move her head so she can look at his face. _What about_ me _? I’m right fucking here_. Standing there, she comes face to face with the stone-cold reality that she might not be enough. Not for him.

Not when they’re his family. When he believes that he’s indebted to them for whatever fucked up reason he’s convinced himself is the truth, one she won’t ever be able to talk him out of, because when he was just a boy his mom ingrained into him that his sister is his responsibility. He won’t do anything to jeopardize her happiness, or well-being, not even if it costs him his. She can’t compete with a childhood of indoctrination.

Bellamy softly kicks his foot at nothing, sniffing in that way he always does when he’s put in a situation he doesn’t like, hand reaching up to tug at his ear. “Even if Wells would give us his blessing — we all know he would just be doing it for us, because that’s who he is.” There’s a faint, contrite smile this time that does manage to fight it’s way across his face before his jaw clenches again. “He’s a better man than I will ever be.”

Her hand reaches out for his. He’s enough for her. It hurts her to admit that when Wells is half of her heart, half of her life, half of who she is, but Bellamy is special. She guesses she’s just selfish in a way he could never be. Maybe that’s why. “I would pick you, you know?”

“I know,” he says, quiet, squeezing her fingers. He gives her half a sad grin. And he’s still protecting her, still putting her above his needs, even now, when he tells her the only thing she knew he would from the second he said _Wells will forgive you_ , “But I’m not going to let you.”

She’s not sure what that means for the two of them, but in the end she’s too scared to ask.

∴

Clarke asks Wells to meet her at the old little diner they used to hang out at regularly, figuring that if he wasn’t ready, needed more time or space, he would make up some excuse for why he couldn’t make it and then at least she would know. At least she wouldn’t be in this weird in between of Wells’ anger and his forgiveness. She sits down on one of the industrial stools by the window bar and orders a strawberry milkshake she doesn’t touch, instead twists the bezel of her dad’s old watch mindlessly to distract herself from the knots forming in her stomach.

He shows up five minutes early, like she knew he would. He’s always been predictable and it brings her comfort, even now. “Hey,” Wells says, not cold, but also not as kind as usual, sliding into the seat beside hers. She can’t tell what mood he’s in.

Clarke echoes his greeting, clearing her throat after a long moment of uncomfortable silence. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” He prods, careful, and she bites back a smile. Ever the future lawyer, he never lets her get away with anything.

“For lying.” Her tongue darts out to wet her lips, her gaze dropping down, tracing a drop of condensation sliding down the side of her glass slowly. “I didn’t want anything to change between the three of us.”

Wells nods, slow, one of his elbows on the bar as he studies her, processes it. “But it did,” he prompts, even though it’s not really a question. “It did the second something happened between the two of you.”

“You’re right.” No matter how much she tried to convince herself things could be the same, they never would be again. And maybe that wouldn’t have been all bad, maybe they could’ve had a fighting chance if they’d been honest, but it’s too late now. “I never wanted to hurt you, though. You’re still my best friend. We just—” There is no ‘we’, not any longer, so she avoids that particular direction of her explanation, taking responsibility for her own actions instead. Of how many times she ached to tell him, to share with her best friend how happy she was, before taking the coward’s way out every time. “I didn’t know how to tell you, and I promised him I wouldn’t.” Clarke takes in a shaky breath, all of it boiling down to, “So I’m _sorry_. For keeping it from you.”

For the first time since he sat down, there’s a crack in his objective facade, hurt seeping into his expression. “I wish you would’ve been honest with me.”

“I know,” she relents, dragging her teeth over her bottom lip. If there was anything she wishes she could take back, it was that they kept him in the dark.. “It’s — it was very important to him, you know? That you didn’t find out. At first it just kind of happened, and then it kept happening, and at that point we’d already been sort of lying to you for a while.” She winces to herself, knowing that’s not an excuse, not really. Her fingers brushing through her hair, getting tangled in a knot near the back. Clarke drops her hand in her lap and rephrases, “When it started happening on purpose, it just seemed too late. He wanted to stop, he _did_ , because of you. I begged him not to.”

Wells tenses. He looks off to the side, biting the inside of his cheek. After a beat, he quietly wonders, “You know?”

That he loves her too? Yeah. “I do.”

Nodding, once at first, slowly, and then faster and more resolutely as his dark eyes rise back up to meet hers. He doesn’t look embarrassed, or hurt, just — resigned, recognizing exactly what she _didn’t_ say in acknowledging that he’s in love with her. “I accept your apology,” he says, easy, like it was already decided a long time ago. Clarke represses the urge to reach out and wrap her arms around him, sensing there’s still more he wants to say. He appears hesitant before finally adding, quietly, “But can I ask you something?”

She wipes her damp palms on her jeans, twisting towards him further, invitational. She still doesn’t feel like she’s earned his forgiveness, no matter how willing he is to give it to her. “Anything.”

His eyes bore into hers for a moment like he might find an answer there ahead of the question, before he prompts, neutrally, “Why him?”

She knows what he’s really asking. They are very much alike, the two of them. Her best friends. They’re kind, and open, and loyal. Strong, and responsible, and caring. Both of them are intelligent in their own ways, make her laugh like no one else can, allow her to feel safe enough to talk to them about anything. They’re _definitely_ more than moderately attractive. But, where Wells lets her get away with everything, protects her often even from herself, Bellamy never stays clear from calling her out on her bullshit. He challenges her, keeps her on her toes even if she ends up hating him for it. Where Wells is gentle and calming like the soothing ocean waves, Bellamy is all hot-headed temper like a raging fire. Where one is righteous and moral, the other is a rebel rule-breaker. She grew up with them, she loves them, she doesn’t _know_.

Are those differences the reason why she loves one, and is in love with the other? She wishes she knew, the why, and the when, at what point it all shifted. She wishes she had gotten a choice in the matter, because it probably would’ve been easier for all of them. She wishes she had an explanation for him, for herself, that it would just make sense, like science, or physics. 

Wells is everything anyone could ever want, on paper and in person. Any girl would be so, so lucky to be with him. She doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, or make him feel like he isn’t good enough for her, not enough for her. She wishes she didn’t have to. She wishes she could just return them in the way he wants her to, that she could switch a flip and make it happen. In another life the two of them would’ve been a match made in heaven, she’d be an idiot not to see that. “I don’t know,” Clarke confesses, tears welling up in her eyes rapidly. Her fingers reach up to wipe a few away, but it’s useless. Her voice shakes, “You’re perfect. You’re my best friend in the entire world—”

Wells shifts forward on his stool, pressing his mouth against hers. His lips are warm on hers, a little dry. It’s a nice kiss in theory, but she’s too shocked to kiss back. She’s not sure she even wants to. It’s a weird sensation.

“Sorry,” he says, quickly, pulling back with wide, frantic eyes.

“It’s okay,” she croaks out, still a little dazed. Her mouth tastes like salt.

“No, it’s not,” Wells opposes, his jaw clenching before he shakes his head at himself, full of contempt, a hand running over his head. “That was a shitty thing to do.”

Clarke remains quiet, not sure what to say. It didn’t _feel_ right, but she’d be lying if she said she didn’t wish it did. She doesn’t want to hurt him any more than she already has.

He catches her gaze, shaking his head again, knowing him he’s still kicking himself for doing it. “I’ll accept your apology if you accept mine.”

Her brows raise. “You already accepted mine.”

“I’m still using it as leverage.” He jostles her knee with his hand, offering her half a smile. “I mean, you _were_ having sex with my brother behind my back.”

She wipes at her wet cheeks with her sleeve as she corrects him, pointedly, “Adoptive brother.”

“Behind my back,” he repeats, one eyebrow arched judgingly.

She softens. She wasn’t even mad at him to start with, so she can give him this, if it’ll make him feel better. “Fine.”

A beat, and then, “Was it that bad?’

Clarke grimaces briefly. “Do you really want to know?”

He seems to consider it seriously, lips forming a tight line, before shaking his head quietly. He probably _is_ better off not knowing it was like kissing her brother, which seems a bit too much below the belt.

She smiles, pushing against his knee, mirroring him earlier. “We’ll be okay?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, then sighs wearily. “I just need a little more time.”

“I get it,” she deflates, silently cursing herself for being stupid enough to think this could be it. That she could have him back, after what she’s done to him.

Wells wets his lips. “It’s not you, Clarke. I know — I know you can’t force yourself to have feelings that aren’t there, but that’s not why I was so upset. I never expected you to lie to me in the way that you did, for so long, especially not when it was something about the both of you. When I found out, it just made me feel so alone.” His brows furrow together, and a heavy pit of regret settles in the bottom of her stomach at the look on his face. “I just — I’m working on the forgiveness part, okay?” The corner of his mouth lifts, and it’s something. “I’m halfway there.”

Then he pokes her with the straw from her completely melted milkshake, leaving a sticky-gross wet spot on her shirt, just to make her smile, and she knows. 

She knows they’ll be okay. 

∴

Near the end of August, she and Wells are still tentatively working on repairing their friendship. It’s kind of weird, at first, to be friends with someone while knowing they’re in love with you, but she also remembers him peeing himself in his Pokémon underwear and that horrible unflattering flat top he rocked all through fifth grade, so all in all it’s easy enough to get over. She’s returning a book to him when she catches Bellamy in the living room watching television.

She’s drawn toward him before she can think better off it. They’re not fighting, but they’re also not _not_ fighting. “What are you watching?”

“This documentary about an octopus,” he answers, scraping his throat, looking so casual in his sweatpants and a worn t-shirt that’s probably soft to the touch. His hair is a mess and her fingers itch to smooth it out. Despite probably knowing better, he prompts, “Wanna watch?”

Clarke doesn’t particularly care to watch a documentary about an octopus, but she wants to be around him right now. She misses him. Energy is already crackling beneath her skin as she moves closer, sitting down on the opposite end of the couch, making sure to leave plenty of space between them. 

She fixes her eyes on the screen, but she barely hears a single word, hyperfixated on keeping her own breathing steady. Her entire body aches, her stomach, her heart, her lungs, but it’s like she’s addicted to the pain, to the rush it brings hers, enough to make her forget, just for a moment.

“Clarke,” he pleads after a few moments of silence, his voice rough, wrecked, fingers balling into fists on top of his thighs. She imagines it’s as hard for him as it is for her. She didn’t think it would be _this_ hard.

She blinks at the television, her vision blurry. She hadn’t realized she started crying. It’s too painful, just being near him but not being with him. Not reaching out to touch him, or lean her cheek against his shoulder, or climb on top of him and slant her mouth over his. Like it’s hard for him to to give her the comfort she needs, craves. “I know,” she croaks out, roughly wiping at her cheeks with her palms as she keeps her eyes fixed ahead. If she looks at him, it’s over. “Just — one more minute, okay?”

He gives her one more minute. She doesn’t see him for the rest of the summer.

┇

Clarke loses herself in her classes. They keep her busy, do a good job of distracting her. Before she left to go back to school, she kept waiting for him to show up. Marcus kept checking his watch insistently, making comments about the traffic under his breath. Wells hugged her tightly, apologizing on Bellamy’s behalf. She didn’t want a fucking apology, she just wanted him, wanted her friend back. 

She counts down the days until she can see him again, time dragging on slowly. Halloween comes and goes. She stays at school during her Thanksgiving break, her RA throwing a dinner for any stay-behinds on their floor that she half-heartedly attends for half an hour before slinking back off to her room, claiming a headache. Josie begged her to come along with her to Boston to visit her parents, an hour away, but Clarke can’t bear the thought of having to socialize with anyone for longer than a few minutes at a time.

Christmas is finally near, and she’s actually excited. She won’t admit it, but she hopes that time has healed some of their wounds, that maybe they can be in the same room again without her wanting to break down, or him looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, that they can be friends again. That she can have him back, in any way no matter how small or insignificant, piece by piece.

She attends Mr. Jaha’s annual party with her parents, like always, an unnamed heavy dread settling low in her belly when she realizes she doesn’t see him anywhere. She finds Wells in the kitchen, stealing all the good hors d'oeuvres before they get passed around by the waiters. The caterers let him, because he’s charming, and the two of them make some small talk. Asks him about his classes and that professor he likes, lets him pry into her life too, tells him about her annoying lab partner and that she’s thinking about getting a nose piercing. He laughs at her, decidedly not _with_ her, and it makes her smile. 

Clarke leans back against the counter once his laughter has faded, the sound still ringing in her ears. She worries her lip nervously. “Bell here?” She prods, casual. 

“He decided to stay in New York for the holidays,” Wells discloses, his shoulders tensing as he polishes off the last of his bruschetta duet. Bellamy made the decision to transfer anyway. She found out from Octavia of all people, which stung, she’s not going to lie. She didn’t even get to be happy for him. They still text sometimes, but it’s mostly limited to their group chat with Wells, and it’s not the same. She doesn’t know if he’s trying to keep his distance, or if maybe he’s really moved on. Either way, it sucks all the same.

_Oh._ “Makes sense,” she comments, idly, voice hollow, even if it doesn’t. Octavia is here. Wells is here. Theo is here. She knows she might no longer be a part of the equation, but _they_ are. What could possibly make him want to stay?

“Clarke,” he starts, swallowing nervously, wiping his hands on the back of his fancy slacks. He’s suddenly looking at her as if someone died, fingers twitching at his side with the urge to reach out.

“Yeah?” She wonders, somewhat amused at his sudden change in demeanour, a little confused furrow in between her brow. 

“He has a girlfriend,” Wells reveals, quietly, pained expression on his face. Not pained maybe, sympathetic. His slightly widened eyes stay on her almost frantically like she’s a flight risk. “They’ve been together for a few months now. Right after summer, I think.”

Her stomach drops.

“I figured,” she forces out, pretty evenly, if she does say so herself. She’s smiling, close-lipped, trying to bite back the tears. It’s almost funny. Last year around this time she couldn’t even tell you when the last time was she cried. Now it’s all she seems to do. Everything about Bellamy makes her feel like an exposed nerve, and she hates it. _A girlfriend_. He has a girlfriend.

Wells must notice anyway, despite her best efforts, because a truly pitiful look splits across his face as he tilts it slightly. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for, okay? Don’t apologize,” she brushes him off with a small wave, stealing one of the devilish eggs off his plate and shoving it in her mouth. She swallows it tightly, forcing the tears down with the food. She’s okay. “Now tell me about that girl from your Econ class.”

“You sure?” He checks, obviously still worried, which makes her think she’s probably laid on the cheery tone a little too much.

“Just because I’m miserable doesn’t mean everyone else has to be,” Clarke teases, hoping to break some of the truly suffocating tension, but his face falls even more, and she remembers those kind of ‘jokes’ only ever really worked on Bellamy and he’s not here, so she nudges Wells with her foot. She’ll get over it, she always does. “It’s fine. Come on. I wanna hear about her.”

“Her name’s Delilah,” he starts, warily, still keeping a concerned eye on her even though his mouth is spasming with a smile. This is what she needs. Some normal.

Clarke has to bite back one of her own, even though she’s itching to tease him about his crush. “Delilah?”

And yeah, she’s totally going to tease him, because he can no longer hold back his stupidly goofy grin when he echoes, “Delilah.” 

┇

Hours before going back to school, she humours Wells’ relentless requests over their break by playing a game of chess with him. They settle in downstairs in Mr. Jaha’s library, perched on the window sill. Outside, it’s snowing, little white flakes drizzling down onto the grass and the trees outside, and despite knowing better, she wonders if it’s snowing in New York too. 

Apparently Wells can tell her mind has drifted. He doesn’t look up at her, at least allows her that reprieve. “It’s kind of strange, huh? It being just the two of us.”

Clarke’s eyes are dragged back to the board, and she sees he’s advanced his rook towards her king. She bites the inside of her cheek before offering up one of her pawns to get rid of one of the bishops guarding his queen. “It’s been a long time since it was just you and me,” she agrees, finally. Even though Bellamy was thirteen when the Jahas adopted him, it feels like he’s been around for all of their lives. She never imagined a day where he might not be.

“It won’t always be like this,” he offers, and to his credit sounds like he believes it too. 

She doesn’t really want to talk about it. Not with him anyway. It’d be too weird. Clarke effortlessly slides her knight towards his king, trapping him in place. She smiles, victorious, pulling her knee up to hug it to her chest. “How were you president of your high school chess club and yet you still always lose to me?”

He hisses in mock pain, pressing a hand over his heart as he glares down at the board, even though they both know he’s letting her win. His umber eyes narrow, fluffy white sweater pulled up to his chin, holding out his hand. “Three out of five.”

She huffs out an incredulous laugh, shaking his warm fingers with hers. “Three out five.”

Her mom drives her to the airport later that day and Clarke tries to get back into her old routine at school as much as possible. She thinks she’s doing better, but sometimes she still gets inexplicably sad out of nowhere. She’ll read a book she wants to recommend to him, or the cafeteria is serving his favorite food and she’ll smile before she remembers. It’s the fucking worst.

It’s not like things are horrible between them. He’ll text her every now and then asking her about her classes or her mom, or tags her in an article on Facebook he thinks she’ll find interesting. It’s his way of checking up on her without being too present in her life which makes her feel even more horrible. She’s not a child. She’s not another one of his responsibilities. Petulantly she’ll find herself thinking _why does he get to decide how much of him I get_ and then reminds herself she should be glad she gets any of him at all. 

Sometimes she gets mad too. She’ll archive all of her pictures of him on her Instagram because even in a white-hot frenzy she can never bring herself to delete them, curses his name and his stupid beautiful girlfriend and throws his old raggedy sweater in the trash only to dig it out the next morning. Leaves out-proportionally angry voicemails, and then spends the next twenty minutes hacking into his inbox to delete them because he still uses the same fucking password for everything.

One night she gets really drunk. Josie isn’t even there forcing her into it, which makes it even more pathetic. She’s desperate, grasping onto anything that might help her insulate this ever-present hollow ache inside her chest, always throbbing painfully, reminding her what she’s lost. Clarke goes to a hole-in-the-wall bar out of the comfort of her little college town and approaches the first guy who looks decent enough. She just wants to forget about everything. She wants to not think about anything for a few damn lousy moments. 

He takes her to his place just around the corner, his hands greedy and his mouth eager, leading her to his bed immediately. The place is a dump, but at least he cuts to the chase. He tastes like smoke and beer and something not entirely right, so she pushes his head down to her neck. Clarke doesn’t bother undressing any further than ripping open the buttons on the front of her dress and pushing the cups of her bra down, kicking off her panties. She tries to concentrate on the sensation of his tongue on the tips of her breasts, on the feel of his fingers roughly rubbing her clit before pushing their way inside of her. She tries and tries and tries, but paralyzing pain works it’s way around her heart all the same. All the pleasure this guy brings her is dulled, fleeting, receding quickly like it was never there at all. 

Clarke figures she needs more, frustratedly rubbing her hips up against the guy’s hard bulge before reaching in between them to hastily work open his belt and jeans. She grips him in her hand and positions him in between her legs, dragging her skirt up further. He fumbles for a condom and then does the rest, rolling his hips to sheath himself inside of her. A sigh of relief leaves her in lips in tandem with his, and she thinks _yeah, this is good,_ wrapping her legs around his waist. This is exactly what she wanted. 

He buries his face in her neck, his hips rocking steadily into hers as her eyes slam shut tightly, her heels digging into his still half-clothed ass to spur him on. She forces herself to concentrate on the way his cock is moving inside of her, sliding in and out with a delicious rhythm. Her teeth slide over her bottom lip, digging in hard as unwanted thoughts threaten to push their way in. 

Clarke tastes the metallic tinge of blood. It’s no use. She can’t fight it. She’s too weak. His grunts are echoed in the dark sounds of pleasure the guy is making on top of her, his cock only reminding her of Bellamy’s, her first, her best, stretching her walls, filling her up, making her feel like anyone else never could. His warmth, his heaviness, his stupid jokes and even stupider softness with her. Desperate, she pulls the guy closer, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and pressing her mouth against his collarbone, breasts crushed against his chest, making sure he can’t tell she’s breaking into a million tiny pieces beneath him. Distraught and angry and _broken_ , and silently falling apart under a man who doesn’t even know what her last name is. Who could never truly understand how ruined she is. 

Tears prick at her eyes, only able to form an agreeable hum as he asks her if she’s close. She stares up at the ceiling, waiting for him to finish. As soon as he does, she’s rolling onto her side and swinging her legs off the bed, buttoning up her dress quickly as she tries to hide her wet cheeks from him. What is wrong with her?

“I had fun,” he pants, hand trailing over her shoulder from behind, completely oblivious to the fact she’s choking back a sob as she tries to slip her shoe back on. The hollow ache reappears with the force of a tonne of bricks, knocking the breath from her lungs. It’s useless. Everything’s fucking useless. “We should do that again sometimes.”

He was decent, like she predicted. He even made her come once. But what is the point, when all it does is make her think of him? Of Bellamy, who she can’t fucking have, who doesn’t spend his nights getting drunk and fucking strangers to forget about her because he has a girlfriend? She manages to get on her shoe, finally, and makes her way over to the door. No point in lying, either, so she tells him, fingers wrapped around the knob, “Probably not,” and gets back to her dorm before eleven. 

After that, she swears off any romantic or sexual relationships. It’s not worth it. 

∴

Clarke gets lonely sometimes.

She has dreams. 

They go to a party, and someone looks at her a little too long, looks at her with just a little bit too much interest, and then Bellamy’s dragging her into the pool house. It’s maybe thirty seconds before he’s ripped her skirt up and he’s pounding into her with a brutal pace. Leaving finger shaped bruises on her hips and breasts, biting at the underside of her jaw.

Or they’re on her roof, and he’s slowly sliding into her, his dark eyes boring into hers as his fingers intertwine with hers, filling her to the brim. “I love you,” he whispers, and she reaches up to trace his moonwashed freckles with the tips of her fingers. 

In her dorm, where he takes his time undressing her, worshipping every inch of pale uncovered skin, putting his mouth on her until she’s squirming with need. Driving her crazy as he almost pushes her to the brink over and over again, until she can’t take it anymore and pulls him up, cradling his face with her hands to lick her own taste from his mouth. 

It’s their first time; clumsy hands, and naive longing, and shared laughter. Their last; heated kisses, and reverent looks, and not knowing what was to come.

She tries to stop, but he always returns, even when she begs him not to.

“We can’t do this anymore,” she pants heavily, out of breath from his desperate kisses. He looks up at her with those deep brown eyes and her heart squeezes in her chest painfully. He’s so fucking gorgeous.

“This is the only way I can have you,” he mutters against her breast, laving at her nipple through the thin material of her bra. They’re in his car, in front of his house. Clarke rises onto her knees and sinks down on him, and they fuck just like that, sitting up, her hips rotating on top of him, her forehead against his as she silently cries. He swallows her gasps with his mouth, but doesn’t mention the tears, he never does.

She wakes up just before she comes, every time. And when she does wake, she’s just frustrated, and horny, and angry, that despite everything, he still gets to have this part of her, that she lets herself have it. It’s pathetic, settling in her stomach like a permanent weight. If he asked, she’d be there in a heartbeat, and she feels disgusted with herself for it. It’s not fair, and she desperately tries to find a way to make it stop. 

It has to stop.

∴

“How are you just so — fine all the time?” Josie asks, one time in the library, halfway through their second semester. When Clarke looks up from her textbook, her roommate seems to be studying her with interest, lips lattered in a thick layer of gloss and hair pulled back in two pigtails. 

“Fine?” She repeats, confused as her mind tries to switch from computational biology to whatever Josie’s fishing at, unsure what prompted this sudden observation.

“Well. Not fine, _obviously,_ ” she clarifies, eyes flicking up to the fancily coffered ceiling. “You’ve closed yourself off to anything and anyone, and you refuse to talk about it in any sort of capacity. You’re like the iceberg that brought down the Titanic and killed off the love of my life.” She pouts, probably in loving memory of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, tapping her pen against the side of her book. “Fuck, if I didn’t know you before this year, I’d think you were perfectly okay.” Like always, Josie doesn’t bother keeping her voice down for anyone, and the library technician is glaring their way. Her unbothered roommate just blinks at her curiously. “Is it like functional depression or some shit? You know they have pills for that.”

Maybe she was doing a better job at keeping herself together than she initially thought, even if it’s exhausting her to the bone. Clarke presses her mouth together in a thin line and stares at the glossy picture of a string of DNA in her book. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A moment of silence follows as Josie’s narrowed gaze on her grows heavy. “Whatever.” She sighs, world-weary, stretching her arms out above her head as she leans back in her chair. “You know what? I’ve been feeling gloomy too after Gabriel started sleeping with that skank from his psych class. Want to go to the mall later and get our hair dyed or something?”

For once, Josie actually makes a suggestion she can work with. Maybe if she looks different, she’ll feel different. Feeling different, that’s the dream. If anything, she doesn’t really have anything better to do anyway. She’s still working on the making new friends part. “Sounds like a plan.”

∴

In early February, he calls her.

Clarke actually has to do a double take when she sees the caller-ID, phone buzzing insistently in her palm. She picks up, because there was never any question she wouldn’t.

“Hey,” Bellamy greets her, voice crackling over the speaker of her phone, reminding her of how terrible the service is down here. 

“Hi,” she croaks out, leaning her head back on the cold tile of the bathroom, hoping the cold sensation will help calm her racing heart. She’s been in here for way too long by now and her study group is probably going to ask questions, but she can’t really seem to make herself care. Not today.

He’s quiet for a second before he sniffs. “How are you doing?” 

“Okay.” She keeps her answer short, evasive, making it easier on herself not to break.

There’s a sharp inhale on the other end of the phone. “How are you _really_ doing?”

“I don’t know,” she snaps, unreasonable and completely unfair. He’s just being a good friend. Except they’re not friends anymore, not really, and her entire life fucking sucks. She doesn’t want him to be there for her. She needs him to, but she doesn’t _want_ to need him to. “I’m in the basement of the library building, sitting on the disgusting bathroom floor, trying not to cry too hard. What do you think?”

He makes a considerate noise in the back of his throat, gruff. “That’s more like it.”

Clarke runs her hand through her hair, still not used to the new length, before dragging it over her wet face. Maybe this is just who she is now. A terribly pathetic shell of a girl who never stops crying. Her teeth grit together. “I’m miserable. I feel like shit. Is that what you wanted to hear?’

“We’re getting there,” he jokes, half-hearted, his voice soft. It just makes her eyes sting with more tears.

Defeated, she lets her head loll to the side, shaking her head. Her free hand curls angrily around the bottom of her sweater and when she licks her lips, the taste of salt explodes on her tongue. “Why are you calling?”

“Because…” Bellamy starts, and even just the sound of the rough timbre of his voice is enough to lull her into a false sense of security. He sighs. “Because I still remember what it was like, the day I found out. And every year that goes by you think you’re doing fine, that you’re completely over it, that this is the year it won’t hurt as much.” Her eyes slide shut, more wet warmth slipping down her flushed cheeks. “And then suddenly you unlock your phone and see the date and you feel like you’re right back in that moment.”

She could’ve called Wells, she assumes. His mom died too, he knows what it feels like. But it’s been so long for him, they were only just children when Imane passed away. He’s admitted to her once that he doesn’t even remember what his mom sounds like. Clarke’s afraid she’ll forget too. 

Tapping the spider web-cracked screen of her dad’s watch softly with her fingernail, she sniffs. She’s always hated being vulnerable with other people, and although the trust is still there, she is well aware she has to stop depending on him, for both of their sakes. “I don’t need you to check up on me.” 

“Yeah,” Bellamy muses, laced with sarcasm. “Because chopping your hair off and dying it red screams mental stability.”

Her gaze flicks up to the ceiling, annoyed. “It’s pink and it’s just a few strands.” 

“That’s not pink,” he insists stubbornly, like he’s studied the photo Josie uploaded on her Instagram closely. She guesses for her roommate the fresh highlights and bangs worked. Gabriel came crawling back before the day was over. For Clarke it didn’t fix anything.

“You’re _wrong_ ,” she emphasizes, just because she loves saying it. A pressure headache is starting to build behind her eyes and she knows today is not done being rough, so pretending like any of this is normal for as long as she can is the one leniency she’ll allow herself. “It’s okay. Most men are color blind.”

He makes a sound in the back of his throat that’s both indignant and surprised. “Glad to hear they’re actually teaching you something at that school.”

Ripping off a piece of toilet paper, she dabs at her chin and last night’s mascara-stained cheeks. A quick glance at her phone tells her she really is pushing it, staying down here so long. “Yeah, well, my name is somewhere on one of these wings, remember? Have to keep up appearances.”

“If only riding along on your parents’ coattails could’ve gotten you a hairdresser that didn’t mix up their red and pinks.”

Clarke laughs, a huff of surprised laughter followed by an unrestrained burst of joy, and that somehow feels like this enormous, previously unobtainable, precious gift on a day like this. And then it fades and she’s smiling, stupid, and for a moment, it feels just like the old times. “I miss you,” she blurts out. 

On the other end of the line, Bellamy takes in a sharp breath. “Yeah,” he says, agreeing as if he can’t actually repeat the words back to her. It should make her feel relieved, that he misses her too, but instead it just makes her even more sad because apparently he doesn’t miss her enough.

“Why did you never?” She wonders, wiping at the tear that’s dripping from her red nose. She doesn’t mean to bring it up, but her mind keeps going back there. Back to the moments she shared with him, and there’s some things she can’t move past yet, that haunt her, plague her. 

There’s a click in the back of his throat. “Never what?”

She might as well, who knows when they’ll be talking again, who knows when or if she’ll ever be brave enough to bring it up again and he’ll be pliant enough to answer. “Have sex in high school?”

“Clarke, I don’t think—“ Bellamy opposes, weary. It makes her smile, faint, thinking of how he’s probably frowning, trying to figure out where she’s going with this.

“Humour me,” she cuts him off, gentle. Teasingly, she adds, “I promise I won’t tell your girlfriend.”

A scoff, then silence. Clarke’s at the point where she thinks he won’t answer at all, his unease and frustration radiating off him even through the phone, when she hears him suck in a breath. “Because I couldn't stand the thought of it being anyone but you.” She thought it would make her feel better, if she knew. Instead it just hurts more. “I could never go through with it. I wanted to but then I would think of having to face you the next day and I — couldn’t. So when I got to college, I just tried to get it over with as soon as possible.”

_Get it over with_. Isn’t that what she once thought about losing her virginity? Instead of getting over anything, it started an entirely new shitstorm of complicated events.

She wishes she had been more aware back then, that she had been more attentive to him. Maybe if she knew how he felt about her beforehand, everything could’ve been different. “Do you ever wish we hadn’t made that stupid pact?”

Another beat passes and Clarke feels like the ground is being peeled back beneath her, layer by layer, her stomach twisting with nausea as she waits to be swallowed whole. She shouldn’t have asked, but that’s a thing they both have in common. She likes being a masochist, especially when she’s already down.

“Sometimes, yeah,” Bellamy admits, reluctant yet genuine, and it stings, but she gets it. Lately she’s been wondering more and more if in the end their relationship was worth their friendship. Maybe their ending was always inevitable but they could’ve grown apart more organically, instead of whatever this weird in between is now. She can’t even begin to even think about healing, because he’s still stuck there, inside of her, like an infection.

Still. She can’t bear to think of taking it all back. For whatever it’s worth, “I’m glad it was you.”

Bellamy gets quieter. Wistful, and _God_ , she is in so much fucking pain, “Me too.”

Clarke is exhausted, her head throbbing dully. The silence envelops them for a moment, just listening to each other breathe as they share a moment of serenity through the heavy undertow of bittersweet feelings—sad, happy, angry, regret, confusion, despair, _hope_ —raging inside of veins.

She brushes at the last of the tears on her cheeks and chin with the heel of her hand, her splotchy red skin raw and sensitive, forcing herself to smile and sound upbeat. She’s not going to cry anymore today. “What’s she like?”

He hesitates, only for a second. He seems to realize the same thing as her. If they are ever going to go back to anything that even so much as resembles normal, they need to get comfortable with talking about stuff like this too. “She’s great,” he gives her, affectionate. “Kind. Caring. I think you’d really like her.”

She’s struggling to breathe, but still part of her is glad for him. That he moved on, that he gets to be happy, even if it’s without her. He deserves that, even if Clarke could never _like_ her. She says the thing she should anyway, “I’d love to meet her.”

“You will,” he promises, confident in a way she’s yet to attempt when it comes to their future. And she imagines in another life she _would_ have loved to meet Roma, take her to lunch, amicably talk shit about Bellamy’s worst qualities and show her embarrassing childhood pictures from before his voice dropped and he was incapable of growing a beard. He’s _still_ incapable of growing a beard. But now sharing that version of Bellamy, the only one she still truly has, feels more like giving a part of herself away.

The pressing feeling of time running out overwhelms her all of a sudden. Her eyelids flutter closed, and she squeezes them shut tightly. “Don’t—promise me you’ll stop hiding from me, okay?” She takes in a shaky breath, unable to keep desperation from coating her voice. Her fingernails leave little half-moons in her palms and her jaw aches from the way she’s clenching it. “You’re still my—“

“I know.” She’s glad Bellamy cuts her off, because she wasn’t sure what she was going to call him, if there are even sufficient words to describe what he means to her. Even still. And for the first time during this entire phone call, he sounds strained, like maybe he isn’t as over her as he’s pretending to be, his voice thick with emotion, “I promise I’m doing my best, okay?”

“I can’t believe this. It’s _my_ dad’s death anniversary, and we’re talking about you,” Clarke jokes drolly, hoping to break the loaded tension in the air even though they’re miles and miles apart.

It works. “Well, you’re obviously doing fantastic, so it’s only fair. You didn’t even call me on the day _my_ mom died.”

“That’s because I knew you’d be taking the bus to visit your old hometown with Octavia like you do every year.” They get there by noon, have lunch at this little shop that sells their mom’s favorite kind of waffles, bring fresh flowers and a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels to her grave and then have dinner over at their aunt’s house long enough to remind them why they’re glad she never got approved as a guardian in the first place. 

Life could have been so different, if it didn’t work out the way it did, and she is glad that despite everything that happened, hers has him in it.

“Jesus Christ. We get it. You’re a better friend than I am,” he deadpans, obviously teasing and some of the tension in her muscles slowly starts to drain. And then, because he can’t help it, corrects her, “It was in the middle of my exams. _She_ took the bus this year. I was there with her in spirit and on Facetime.”

“Did she talk the whole time?” Clarke prompts, a little alarmed. It’s a three hour bus ride. There, _and_ back. 

He snorts. “You’d be surprised how much she actually has to tell me now I’m not on her very last nerve every weekend.”

She makes a considerate sound, then shakes her head a little, dragging herself off the floor and up to her feet. Her head feels light for a second as she adjusts to the sudden change in altitude. “I should go.” She pulls in a long breath when she thinks about having to socialize with other people today. “I gotta head back to real life now before my study group thinks I’ve ditched them and they give away my spot to someone else.” 

Clarke fluffs out her hair in the mirror with her free hand, then turns on the faucet to turn her wrists under the cold water and wash her hands, the phone pressed in between her ear and shoulder. She looks horrific. Her eyes are bloodshot, her skin a splotchy red, her hair a frizzled mess. She doesn’t care.

“Yeah,” Bellamy answers, distracted, then, after a beat, sighs, some commotion on the other end of the line as he rumbles through what she assumes is his stuff. “Yeah. I have a lecture in a few minutes anyway.” 

He sounds hesitant. Maybe he feels the same way as her. Like they only exist in these vacuums of time and space now, that one good moment isn’t a guarantee for the next. That they aren’t sure when and if there’ll even be a _next_. Everything is uncertain now, their conversations like balancing on a tightrope, any word or noise holding the power to tip them over.

“Thanks. For calling,” she expresses, ripping a paper towel from the dispenser on the wall. She can’t come up with a reason to stall, so, “Don’t be a stranger, okay? I mean that.”

“We’ll never be strangers, princess,” he objects, softly, and she finds she’s closer to a smile than to tears. 

Progress.

┇

Clarke gets a job over the summer in her college town doing administrative work for a doctor’s office. It’s boring, but it’ll look good on her resume and it keeps her busy, which she figures will be easier. She’s also afraid of what’ll happen if she allows herself to stop, if she lets her mind catch up with everything she’s been bottling up and stuffing away. Wells ended up getting his internship position so he’s busy with that anyway, and she knows Octavia and Bellamy are taking a road trip along the Oregon Trail through the States, watching from a distance as Octavia documents every day with extensive pictures. 

There’s their old lousy tent giving out on their first night at the Alcove Spring in Kansas which obviously needed to be chronicled with several Instagram lives, the shots of a sweaty Octavia rolling her eyes as Bellamy’s intently listens to a guide at Fort Kearny in the background, and the photodump of Courthouse and Jail Rock, Chimney Rock, Independence Rock, Devil’s Gate and many more rocks, lovingly captioned ‘ _so many rocks_ ’. Octavia pretends she is being dragged along against her will, but Clarke can tell she is loving every second of it. She knows for a fact Bellamy picked this tour because of the stunning landscapes as much as it’s historical significance. His sister’s always been an outdoorsy person, even after she found out scaling trees weren’t one of her natural talents, and she _does_ love spending time with her brother, especially when he is giving her his undivided attention.

Clarke tries not to long for the days she would’ve been asked to come. 

He calls her when they get to the Rocky Mountains in late August. 

“I’ve never seen constellations this clear. I tried to figure out which ones they were, but then I remembered I never really listened when you tried to explain them,” Bellamy teases, coaxing a small laugh from her. 

He sounds really happy, free. It warms her heart. “I’m surprised you even have service down there.”

“We’re climbing Longs Peak tomorrow so we’re at a hotel nearby.”

“A hotel?” Her eyebrows raise, skepticism creeping into her tone. “Look at you, big spender.”

It earns her a snort. “O’s been getting antsy sharing a thirty square foot tent with me for so long, but I _think_ she didn’t want to seem rude by saying that, so instead she told me I smelled terrible and that we should consider renting a real shower for the night.”

“So much less rude, I see what she was thinking there,” she retorts, amused. “She’s really growing up, huh? Developing manners and empathy and all that adult shit.”

“I know. It’s scary,” Bellamy chuckles. “Wished you could’ve seen her when we were stranded in the middle of nowhere without any sense of direction or food. She caught a rabbit and even knew how to prepare it for dinner. I’d never seen her like that.”

Which sounds a little bit like he wished she could’ve been there—if not for the whole trip, then a few days— if she uses her imagination. “I’m not completely convinced she’s not a serial killer, Bell, I’d watch out,” Clarke teases, pulling her covers up to her chin as she turns on her side, fixing her eyes on the wall. Her pulse is rattling dangerously fast.

“I think if she wanted to kill me she would’ve by now,” he jokes right back. “How’s your job?” He prompts, yawning near the end. “Still kind of weird to think of you as a working girl.”

“Shut up,” she bites without any real heat, idly picking at the wallpaper on a spot where it’s peeling. “It’s boring,” she settles on, and then because she doesn’t really want to talk about _her_ life, “You should go to bed, you sound tired,” despite selfishly wanting to keep him on for longer. She would never forgive herself if he tumbles down a summit tomorrow because he was too sleepy on his feet. 

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Bellamy sighs, even if she wishes he would disagree with her, just this once.

She tugs too hard on the wallpaper, and it rips off the wall. “Don’t die falling down a rock, okay?”

She hears the smile in his voice, envious that she doesn’t actually get to see it. “What a way to go though. I bet I’ll get a mention in the newspaper.”

“Octavia will just be laughing down at you from the top of the mountain,” Clarke offers, dry. “It’ll be embarrassing.”

“Fine,” he concedes with mock-weariness. “Guess I’ll stick it out a few more years.”

Before he hangs up, in lieu of a goodbye, she tells him, “Have fun.”

Once they meet up with Roma in her small hometown near the Columbia River, Clarke stops religiously checking Octavia’s Instagram all together. Every day she goes to bed tired, but she doesn’t get as sad anymore. It still hurts, but it’s a distant, habitual ache. One she can learn to live with. 

┇

It’s Halloween her junior year when Josie forces her to throw on a make-shift catsuit that’s nothing more than a pair of glorified leather pants and a tight cami with a fluffy cat ears headband to boot, feeds her five jello shot in rapid succession while perched on the edge of her bed, and informs her, while drawing ‘sexy’ whiskers on her face with charcoal eyeliner, “No boy, girl, anything else in between or beyond, is worth more than a year of wearing a second-rate chastity belt over. It’s been pathetically long since you’ve gotten laid and I should know, because I was a clean teen in high school.”

Clarke is ready to protest the second she says it, a plethora of excuses swimming to the surface of her mind as a first defense set in place a long, long time ago. A compromise the very best of them; she’ll come along to the party, and she’ll play some drinking games, and she’ll have fun, maybe even entertain a fratboy or two for a while, but under no circumstances will she need a wingwoman. That seems like a disaster (or perhaps even a threesome) in the making.

Then, she gives it an actual second, and then another, and finds her body has no real visceral reaction to the suggestion, and figures that maybe Josie is right. It’s been a while since that last catastrophic encounter at that bar last year, and maybe it _is_ time, to give it another shot. She doesn’t need to meet the love of her life tonight, but she could let loose a little, get used to the thought of being with someone else again. 

The party sucks though. The music is terrible, and it’s way too crowded, and they’re serving spiked green punch that tastes like organic whole wheat freshly produced vegan vomit so she steers clear from it all night. Josie stops babysitting her once Gabriel gets jealous of the amount of guys she’s been grinding up against, instead shoving her into an alcove in the hallway and doing God knows what to her. It allows Clarke to take a breather and let down her mask of fake niceties and feigned interest, escaping outside to the porch.

There’s a girl sitting in one of the loungesets in the dark, a pointy witch hat perched on top of her head and her legs casually pulled up to her chest. There’s a red solo cup in one hand and a blunt dangling from the other. When Clarke draws nearer, she can make out enough facial features to realize the girl’s pretty, like strikingly so, and her blue eyes have a mind of their own as they track every single one of her movements as she puts the joint to her full black-tinted lips, taking a slow drag. 

Her voice is kind of cute, not at all sultry and deep like she’d expected. The girl takes in her costume with blank, unabashed eyes. “You know black cats bringing bad luck is actually a common misconception.”

“I know, that’s why I ran into you,” Clarke grins, coy, surprised at how much game she still has left after being out of practice for so long. The booze in her system is probably helping.

”You’re sweet,” the girl gushes, somehow still in a _cool_ way, moving aside a bit in what Clarke assumes is an invitation. “I’m Gaia.”

“Clarke,” she returns, carefully sitting down in the spot next to her. She really is stunning, with her sparkling dark eyes, her gentle but bright smile and the adorable curve of her apple cheeks, her sepia skin smooth and soft-looking. 

The girl sees her staring, but to her credit doesn’t shy away from it. She holds out the blunt for her, but Clarke waves her off. Those jello shots started to get to her head about thirty minutes ago, and she doesn’t feel like adding weed to the mix. Gaia offers her her cup of the punch next, and her face must fall visibly, because she laughs, a soft, melodic sound. “It’s not so bad if you swallow really fast.”

She smiles, taking it, an excited thrill shooting up her spine as their fingers brush. She’s missed this, more than she’d care to admit. This careful push and pull, getting to know someone, trying to charm them, the unpredictability that comes with flirting. A horrific smell wafts up from the cup and infiltrates her nose, but Clarke braves a sip anyway. Her face scrunches up as she struggles to work it down her throat. “Yeah. _No._ That’s still disgusting.”

She takes another drag, leaning back against the bench, brushing her bleached dreads over her shoulder. She smells nice, like something woodsy and clean, incense too, maybe. “What brings you out here, Clarke?”

“Hoping to find someone like you,” she asserts, trying to gauge if she’s interested or not before she takes this any further. Girls are nice, always so fucking nice. Which is good, but also annoying, if you’re trying to figure out whether they’ll allow you to get into their pants or not.

“Your aura is interesting,” Gaia muses, wistful, distracted, instead of giving her a single clue about whether or not she’s into getting eaten out by her. Her free hand reaches out to comb aside a thin strand of blonde hair that’s escaped Clarke’s headband with her pinky, tracing it down her temple with an intent look on her face. “So much hidden torment in your soul.“ The way she’s looking at her is starting to make Clarke feel uncomfortable, her gaze strong and invasive, like she’s seeing right through her. For a second she thinks Gaia might say more about her _hidden torment_ , but then she just grins, white teeth gleaming in the dark. “You should come over to my dorm sometime. I could give you a tarot reading.”

She swallows, catching her hand with hers. “If I say yes, will you let me kiss you?”

Gaia puts out the joint with her slender fingers, leaning over to put it in the ashtray resting on top of an empty upside down beer crate, before twisting toward her on the lounge set. Everything about her is so certain, so self-assured, taking her time, even as she leans in close, cupping her cheek with her small hand before pressing her mouth against hers.

Her breath catches for a moment, her shoulders tensing up but then she realizes she feels okay. More than okay. Her lips are soft, and taste like chapstick, and when she opens up, Gaia’s tongue softly licks into her, exploring her thoroughly. Clarke’s pulse flutters as she pushes closer, wrapping her fingers around the other girl’s wrist as her free hand clutches the material on the side of Gaia’s lacy black bustier. 

Clarke is okay even when Gaia’s hand slides over her cheek into her hair, nipping at her bottom lip and sucking on her tongue. She’s still okay when Gaia shifts back against the armrest of the bench, pulling Clarke along with her, dragging her weight on top of her petite body. She’s even okay when small hands work their way under her top, sliding over the bare skin of her lower back, the kiss turning wet and dirty and _needy_. 

She realizes this means she’s really moving on, that she’s finally let him go, and then she suddenly realizes she feels sick, really sick, the combination of that punch and the jello shots and Gaia’s proximity proving to be a little too much. Her stomach twists, and she has to pull away from her. Clarke hurries over to the railing of the porch, getting there just in time to cough up the little she ate today, and then some. 

“Must’ve been the punch after all,” Gaia says sweetly, so understanding, so gently, rubbing her back softly, and Clarke nods, readily taking the excuse as she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. What else is there to say? That she’s hung up on someone who moved on weeks after they broke it off over a year ago? It’s embarrassing. Josie was right. She really is pathetic.

“I’m gonna go get some water,” Clarke whispers, voice hoarse from throwing up, her forehead damp from sweat and her foggy head still spinning. She’s so disappointed in herself. She just wants to go back to her dorm and crawl under the covers. “I’ll come find you later, okay?”

Gaia bobs her head, obviously being able to see through her lie, but not pushing it. Why would she? They’re strangers. “Nice meeting you, Clarke.”

“You too.”

┇

Clark goes back home for the holidays. She arrives a few days later than usual, helping out the GP she worked for during the summer with the pre-Christmas surge of patients. By the time she gets to her childhood home, she’s exhausted from her red-eye flight, and passes out in the living room after dinner, halfway through an old episode of Jeopardy. 

Her mom’s bought her a new dress that she wears to the Jahas’ party, it’s a light blue floral dress with short butterfly sleeves and a flippy hem. There’s some cleavage, because it’s a v-neck, but the length makes up for it, reaching just mid-calves. All in all, it’s relatively modest, and a little maternal, and not at all her style, but it’s a gift, and her mom was trying, and she has no one to impress, so she wears it. 

Bellamy’s the one who opens the door, and she’s actually a little surprised. Her mom pulls him in for a hug, and Kane shakes his hand while clapping his shoulder, and then it’s her turn. Clarke nervously fumbles with one of the buttons of her coat, but she didn’t need to worry, apparently, because his arms reach out to wrap around her tense frame. 

Her hands come up from under his arms to palm the back of his shoulders, burying her lower face into the crook of his neck. He’s warm, and solid, and it ends entirely too fast. She feels a little dizzy even, when they pull apart, reaching up to fix the strand of hair that fell from her ponytail during the hug back from her face. He smiles at her though, soft and special, and yeah, it still feels a little strained, this between them, but so much better than before, like things might actually be getting towards okay. 

Her body’s still buzzing from their lack of space, making her throat constrict painfully. It almost feels like an impasse, this, aimlessly holding each other’s gazes for far too long. Eventually he breaks it, averting his eyes as he scrapes his throat.

“You look nice,” he comments, closing the door behind her as she shrugs out of her burgundy coat. He takes it from her, tossing it into the coat room without much tact, and she studies him in the meantime. The dark blue sweater sitting nicely across his shoulders, sleeves pushed up to reveal his forearms, and she thinks he actually tried to tame his hair tonight. 

“So do you,” she settles on, straightening out her skirt as her gaze wanders off, trying to see where her parents went off to.

Out of the corner of her eye she can see he pulls on the collar of his sweater, wiping his palms on his thighs. “Let me introduce you to someone.”

“Sure,” Clarke answers, distracted, waving over Wells as she follows Bellamy into the living room. They hug, and exchange quick ‘how are you’s, before she’s trailing back after an impatient Bellamy, towards the firemantle. 

“Clarke,” he clears his throat, and she starts smiling before she realizes he’s looking at someone else. She turns her head, coming face to face with the girl she’s only seen in pictures so far. _Oh._ Clarke refuses to let her small falter, taking in the girl. She’s pretty, tall and slender, long straight brown hair falling over her shoulders, down the stiff grey dress she’s wearing, a tacky reindeer pinned to her modestly-sized breast and little teardrop shaped fake pearl earrings dangling from her ears. Clarke hadn’t expected her to look like an ogre, really, the universe hasn’t ever been that kind to her, but watching his hand fold over the small of her back stings just a little bit more nonetheless. “This is Roma.”

Clarke tries to hate Roma, she does. She tries to hate the way she talks, how placating she is, how nice and kind and inviting and accepting and perfectly _tolerable_ , how she coaxes soft smiles from Bellamy she hasn’t seen on him in years. In the middle of her story about how she’s in college studying to be a kindergarten teacher, she thinks of how the girl’s probably never gone down on him, and finds herself quietly smiling with amusement and some sick kind of satisfaction, and then rails it in, realizing she’s being a literal psychopath. Roma is sweet, she is, she likes hiking and crossword puzzles and baking pies and has this sickenly affectionate look in her eye whenever she watches Bellamy talk. Probably the kind of girl Clarke would pick from a catalogue if she had to find her best friend the perfect girlfriend, if that sort of thing existed. If she looks and is the exact opposite of Clarke, it’s not an observation she makes willingly or stores away to wallow over later.

The night drags on. Octavia is being nice to her, or at least trying to. Wells and Bellamy are laughing together by the tree, sipping from identical looking glasses. Mr. Jaha ropes her into being his teammate in a game of Christmas Charades against some of his colleagues. The evening is shaping up to be quite nice, even.

At least, it seems to be, until she slinks off towards the kitchen to find a stronger drink, texting Josie to ask how her Christmas is going so far, and literally runs into Bellamy as he’s making his way out of there. She makes a small noise in pain, glaring up at him as she rubs at her jawline. “Watch where you’re going.”

He scowls down at her, but a little like he’s putting it on for her sake. “If you weren’t so occupied with your phone, maybe you wouldn’t have crashed into me.”

“You’re taller than me, it’s automatically your fault.” It makes sense. He has a better vantage point. 

“Oh, mistletoe,” one of their neighbours sing-songs conspiratorially, Clarke immediately tensing up as she slowly drags up her eyes to the little bush of green clipped to the top jamb of the door. Dread quickly fills her system, turning her blood into ice inside her veins as she blanches. 

Bellamy seems frozen into place as well, the tips of his ears turning red as their eyes meet, his gaze heavy. It seems like they’ve found themselves at a _real_ impasse now. Her mouth dries up, her pulse struggling to remain a steady rhythm. His girlfriend is laughing in the back with Wells (what the fuck, bro?), amused by their embarrassment making Clarke wonder what exactly Bellamy told her they are (siblings?), fucking Mrs. Desai from down the block giggling along like it’s some sort of funny joke to humiliate her amongst a room full of people, a waiter behind Bellamy smiling along knowingly at all the awkward teen angst on display. 

It feels like a test. If she bolts, she’s basically admitting that — there’s still _something._ And Bellamy, he’s fine, without her, has been for a while, so she can’t really give in to her desire to get the hell out of there.

Bellamy scratches his neck, starting to stammer. It couldn’t be more clear she’s the last person he could possibly want to kiss. “Uhm. We don’t have to—” 

Her teeth grit together. “Shut up.” He’s standing so close to her, it’s killing her. It’s killing her she no longer has the girlfriend _or_ best friend privilege to reach out and touch him. Not here, not whenever else she wants. To an insurmountable extent, she’s never really grasped that until this moment.

“Excuse me?” He bites back, something heated flaring in his eyes.

Regardless, it’s bound to be awkward. Either because they’re friends, or they used to fuck on the regular, or because their friendship is still on the rebound and they’re sort of exes in that unspoken kind of way, or the fact she still thinks of him as more than a friend, maybe a happy-go-lucky combination of all of it. 

“Fucking bend down a little already or something,” she orders, her cheeks heating at being the prolonged centre of attention, getting antsy. She needs to get this over with already, she has to get away.

He gives her a strange look, but obeys, ducking his head and she quickly presses up on her tiptoes, kissing his cheek. “There,” she grunts, ignoring the way her heart’s hammering a fast staccato in her ribcage, before pushing past him. 

“Try not to crash into any more people, princess,” he calls after her, pointedly, an obvious challenge in his voice, but she ignores him. 

The party starts to wind down around eleven, because most of the guests are in their mid-fifties, but the night’s still young and Octavia mentions that a brother of a senior she hangs out with sometimes is having a small get-together at his house. It’s definitely code for a rave in the home of some guy she’s into, but Clarke’s not going to be the one to break the news to Bellamy, who already looks displeased enough at the idea of her _hanging around_ a senior, let alone their brother who’s probably in college. Or even worse, a drop-out. He would have a conniption. 

Clarke is half-tempted to just go home and go to sleep, but Wells says he won’t go if she doesn’t, and he’s _obviously_ using her as an excuse so he can text Delilah all night and come on way too strong and ruin his life forever, so she basically has no choice but to come along. 

The colorfully lit-up house is packed by the time they get there, a dance remix of Mariah Carey’s Christmas hit booming from the speakers inside, the bass thumping through her body, and she definitely feels a little overdressed, but everyone seems buzzed enough not to notice. 

She squeezes Wells’ shoulder as soon as they move their way through the first batch of sweaty bodies, struggling to tell him over the loud music that she’s going to find a toilet. 

Somehow Roma ends up in line for the bathroom behind her, and mirrors her position, leaning back against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. Her cheeks are flushed, even though all Clarke’s seen her sip on all night was one glass of champagne. 

“I’ve been wondering,” she starts, her head lolling to the side over the tacky floral wallpaper. She seems to confuse Clarke’s neutral expression for an open invitation to girl talk. “Did you ever...?”

Her eyes widen, her stomach dropping. _Fuck._ Was she being that obvious? If Roma didn’t already know, there was most likely a reason Bellamy didn’t want her to know, and Clarke doesn’t want to be the one who changes that. There’s enough bad blood between them already. “What?”

“Oh, come on,” Roma cajoles, blushing even more, elbowing her as much as she can in her current position, arms still draped over her waist. “Wells is cute.”

_Wells._ Clarke has to resist the urge to clap a hand over her mouth and burst out in laughter. She thinks that she and _Wells._..? “No. I’m more into girls,” she ends up saying, actually letting a huff of laughter escape.

It’s not really a lie. She _is_ more into girls. And Bellamy. An omission she feels like she can get away with. This girl just showed up, Clarke’s been here for over a decade — she gets to keep some of her secrets, some parts of Bellamy to herself. 

“Oh,” she says, dumbly, like her spirit’s been crushed all of a sudden. Was she invested in a sweet childhood friends to lovers story here? It’s not going to happen. She tucks her hair behind her ear. “Sorry. I didn’t, uhm, I — nevermind.”

Clarke knows she didn’t mean anything with it, it was a harmless question, an attempt at bonding maybe, and Roma looks spooked, like she’s afraid she might have offended her or something by implying she could be into one of her best friends, or the male species as a whole, and Clarke should probably smooth it over, tell her it’s okay, give her a comforting smile so they can all get on with their night like it didn’t happen. But, the line moves ahead and it’s her turn, so for once, Clarke allows herself to be petty, even if guilt prickles gratingly beneath her skin.

When she comes out, Roma is gone, so Clarke finds her way towards the living room, making a quick pit stop by the drink table to get a cup of beer she won’t touch but to hold on to, so she won’t look like a complete loser. She must look approachable enough, or at least pretty enough to risk it, considering it’s only two and a half songs before a guy comes up to her, trying to make small talk. 

He’s cute, has dirty blonde hair, and scruffy facial hair that tells her he’s at least old enough to drink, and talks a lot. He’s cocky, in a way she would find endearing if it wasn’t for the fact she was feeling so on edge for absolutely no reason, so it’s why she allows him to lead her toward the dance floor. 

The song is upbeat, fun, and he twirls her around and makes her laugh easily when he dances off-beat on purpose, and it’s good, _great_ , until the music morphs into an indistinct Christina Perri song, much slower. The chords sound distantly familiar. He holds out his hand, like an offer, raising his eyebrows, and she figures he at least makes the time pass faster, and takes it, his other hand sliding in place over her waist as they sway softly to the music. 

The guy, Ward she thinks, starts quietly telling her a story about how he used his freshman engineering class skills to fix a broken elevator while a pregnant woman was on board, obviously trying to impress her, and his fingers are kind of clammy, but he smells like pine tree and he’s as unintimidating as they come. _Logs on the fire, fill me with desire_. Her body prickles with unease, and when she shifts to look over his shoulder, she instantly knows why. She catches Bellamy’s gaze with hers, trapping her to the spot. He’s dancing with Roma, hands locked on the small of her back, her cheek resting against his chest.

Clarke swallows hard, struggling to look away from him, to resist the draw she has to him despite everything. _I’ve just one wish on this Christmas Eve_. A little furrow appears in between his brows, making her heart lurch with more longing that she knows what to do with. _I wish I were with you._ Ward’s hand drifts lower on her waist, moving towards her back, and Bellamy’s jaw clenches, his eyes flashing with a familiar darkness. Her breaths start to come in and out harder, her mind racing as she remembers the last time they were at a party and he didn’t like the way someone else was touching her. _I wish I were with you._

Roma lifts her cheek off him, sliding her hands up his chest and curling them around his shoulders. Then she slants her head to the side a little, cutely, murmuring something to him. Bellamy painstakingly drags his dark eyes off of her, his face immediately relaxing as he listens to whatever it is his girlfriend saying, and then he lowers his mouth to Roma’s. She presses up into him, cradling his cheek as her lips curve into a smile against his. 

Bile rises up in the back of Clarke’s throat, and she imagines this is the image that’ll spin around in her head later, when she struggles to fall asleep and all her thoughts invariably drift to him. Every time she thinks she’s moved on, threaded into friendly territory with him, that she can act like a goddamn normal person around him — one look, one touch, or one stupid word sends her right back to square one. Even Bellamy seems to know. Is she only fooling herself? She hastily excuses herself to Ward, cutting him off in the middle of his story, who indignantly calls after her, “It’s _Wick_ ,” and starts to make her way out of there. 

She works so hard to close herself off to everything, to compartmentalize and relativate and fucking _ignore_ , that whenever these kinds of _ugly,_ _possessive, jealous_ , _unwanted_ and _unwarranted_ feelings creep back in they hit her like a truck in the chest. Clarke almost stumbles over her own feet trying to get outside, completely breathless. She needs fresh oxygen, now. The door flies open, finally, the crisp winter air biting into her skin and cooling her heated cheeks instantly as she sucks in a shaky breath. 

She doesn’t cry. She’s done crying. She just gets it under control.

┇

It’s Valentine’s day of all days when she runs into Lexa at the singles mixer organized by their school’s pride club. Clarke went along with this cute little scrawny freshman transboy Luca who lives in her dorm building as moral support, but it only took him ten minutes to lock eyes with an equally young boy named Ethan, and they’ve been talking ever since. The rest will soon be history, she presumes, so she gives them some privacy. 

She spots a familiar figure at the bar, recognizing the long wavy brown hair and the silhouette of her slender back, and even though the thought of her alone should put Clarke in a foul mood, she finds herself making her way over there. Lexa is draped over the bar, nursing a near empty glass of whiskey. Her skin is almost sickenly pallid, her eyes sunken and hollow, her usually razor sharp eyeliner uneven. She looks miserable. 

Clarke tells her as much. 

“If you must know, Costia broke up with me.” She swirls the liquid around in the glass before slamming it back, a bitter expression on her face. An increduled huff of laughter spills from her pink lips. “She is the love of my life, and she broke up with me. Just like that.”

“Been there, done that,” she chuckles dryly, amused by the morbidly ironic turn of events in her life.

Lexa regards her with interest, like maybe she can decipher the answer from her before she has to pose the actual question. “Wells?”

What is _up_ with people assuming she’d go for fucking Wells? No offense, but that bridge’s long burned. She might as well be going around telling people she’s into her brother. Not only that, but why even assume it was one of her friends to start with? Because they’re guys and she’s bi and can’t keep it in her pants? Her jaw clenches, but she breathes through it. Even if Lexa’s right in this instance, she wasn’t back then. It just happened. “Bellamy, actually.”

Lexa laughs, loud and boisterous, and it’s kind of uncanny. Clarke doesn’t think she’s ever heard her laugh. She guesses it _is_ kind of funny and she finds herself laughing along, sliding on top of the stool beside hers as she orders Lexa a new drink, and herself one too. Her ex’s much more fun buzzed, she decides. 

“God, look at us,” she groans after twenty minutes, grimacing, sagging back over her forearms, stretched out over the sticky bar. “We look horrible. Feelings _suck_.” She must be shit-faced. Lexa would call ‘to suck’ slang back in the day. “They make us weak, and stupid, and utterly capricious.” She’s not that drunk, then, if she’s still using words like ‘capricious’. “It’s pathetic.”

Well, she’s right, again, which is a coincidence, really, but not about everything. Clarke thinks she looks pretty banging in this red top with her matching lipstick, long over the part of being heartbroken where you feel like you should look as miserable as you feel. “Speak for yourself.”

Lexa drags her face off her arm, considering her for the first time she sat down. Interest flares up in her glassy eyes. “I assume you’re still into girls?”

She rolls her eyes, her teeth gritting together. Fucking asshole. “I swear to God—”

Taking a sip of the new drink the bartender’s just dropped in front of her, she waves her off, blasé, still swallowing with a grimace as her green eyes flick back over to her. “I’m not being biphobic if that’s what you’re implying. I recognize sexuality is fluid, and it’s been a while since we last spoke.”

“You’re really fucking bad at flirting,” Clarke tells her, brash, leaning closer. Her scent is intoxicating, sending a little thrill of want pulsing between her thighs.

Lexa quirks one of her perfect eyebrows, unfazed. “Then why are you so turned on?”

Their mouths crash together in the middle, desperate and hard, more teeth than lips, more spit than tongue, but it’s hot, and heated, and she yearns for more, more, _more_ , and it’s been a long time she’s yearned for anything. She checks up with Luca to make sure he’s fine, and then lets Lexa take her to her off-campus apartment she got once she started her master, where she eats her out on the kitchen table, twice, before Clarke fingers her against the wall of her bedroom, and then she leaves before the sun even comes up.

Lexa texts her, that following week. Blunt and to the point, like always, _I want you. Are you open to a hook-up?_ And Clarke’s not at all ashamed to admit they sexile Josie for a few hours. It happens again two days later, and then two weeks after that, and then it just keeps happening. 

It’s almost clinical the way they operate, scheduling in a quick fingering session in between her five o’clock bio lab and Lexa’s six o’clock diner meeting with her professor, handling which position they wanna fuck in that particular time like they’re business negotiations, and treating each other like strangers first meeting when they accidentally run into each other in public.

It takes all the romance out of it, and to her surprise, that’s most of the reason why Clarke is enjoying it so much. She gets to blow off some steam without going through nearly half as much trouble. A part of her thinks she should stop falling face-first into these kinds of relationships, another part of her hasn’t felt this free in a while, is relieved and excited and doesn’t care.

“We could make this an arrangement,” Lexa suggested, one night, after the second or third time, wiping Clarke’s spit of her pink lips as she started unfastening the harness of her strap-on at her hip. “We’re sexually compatible, single, both more than capable of staying detached and separating feelings from pleasure. I don’t see why we couldn’t make this a more permanent understanding.”

Clarke still isn’t sure if she even likes Lexa—who is cold, and self-righteous, and sometimes needlessly cruel in the name of being honest—but she liked their arrangement in all it’s simplicity, and missed this kind of human connection more than she’d cared to admit, which is what prompted her to agree. 

The more they hang out, the more Clarke realizes Lexa isn’t always wrong, far from it actually. The sex is good, and it _can_ be good, even if there’s no feelings attached. Better, even.

┇

Bellamy calls her halfway through April. They saw each other during spring break a few times, watching horrible teen movies with Octavia and lazing at the lake with Wells, but she’s trying to keep her distance after what happened last time. She doesn’t trust herself around him.

He’s telling her an extensively long story about his roommate, but her lunch break is almost over and she can tell something is on his mind. He seems distracted and the story is starting to make less sense the longer he goes on, like he’s stalling. A migraine is already starting to form behind her eyelids when she thinks about the rest of her classes for the day and the amount of homework she has, and she’s exhausted. “Spit it out already.”

He doesn’t need to be told twice. “I don’t like who you are when you’re with her.”

_Her?_ What the fuck is wrong with him? Fury spits fire through her veins. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Bellamy makes a noise of frustrated protest. “You know what I mean.”

“ _Enlighten_ me,” she grits, not sure where he got the sudden nerve to interfere with her love life.

“I don’t know what she has over you,” he gruffs back with equal amounts of resentment, like he has any reason or right to be angry with her. It’s been years now, and he’s been too much of a coward to ever bring it up before, and the second she shows even the slightest inclination she might be moving on is when he decides to start caring, like he didn’t get himself a girlfriend, a replacement, the second he got away from her. Out of sight, out of mind. “If it’s just about her pretty green eyes, or if it’s the sex—”

She’s fuming in a way she’s never been before, and something breaks inside of her, her hands shaking and her entire body buzzing with an murderous energy. “You don’t have the right to tell me shit about who I fuck or don’t fuck. Would you like it if I started asking you about Roma, huh?” The seams of her heart feel like they’re tightening and unraveling simultaneously. “Do you like fucking her in missionary once a week? Does she spit, huh?”

“Stop,” he orders, harshly, like she’s actually caught him off guard and hurt his feelings, like _now_ they’re taking it too far. Now, once she’s brought up his perfect little girlfriend that everyone likes, not when he brought up the girl friend she’s fucking that everyone hates. Of course his precious _Roma_ is off-bounds. “You’re acting insane.”

A mirthless snort, and then she bites back, “You’re acting like a gigantic asshole.”

“We can’t keep doing this, Clarke,” Bellamy sighs, frustrated and resigned, like this is all her fault.

_Clarke._ She wants to slap him. _Princess, pretty girl, baby_. All of that’s over, she knows that. But if it’s over he needs to let it be over. He needs to stop dragging all of this shit back up the moment it’s convenient to him. He needs to butt out and give it a rest. 

He needs to give her a fucking break. “You don’t get to come back into my life just like that and judge me for the things that I’ve done just to stay afloat,” she tells him evenly, even though her voice trembles. Lexa isn’t perfect, but she’s good for her, right now. Maybe it’s not forever, and that’s okay, too. “You don’t get a say in who I date.”

“That’s not—I didn’t mean,” he stammers, deflating, then exhales heavily through his nose, probably realizing the way this sounds. “I just want you to be happy, Clarke.”

Happy? “Well, I was,” she bites, meanly, scrubbing a hand over her face. Clarke doesn’t want to be talking to him anymore. “Now I’m just pissed.”

“Sorry, okay?” He snaps, which isn’t much of an apology, and the first part of his next sentence sounds muffled, distanced, like he’s rubbing his mouth, or maybe looking away to try and compose himself. “Jesus, it’s like I can never say anything right to you these days.”

Silence. He used to always know the perfect thing to say to make her feel better. Now all he does is make her feel like shit. 

“I’m just worried about you,” Bellamy tries again, breaking the quiet.

“I hope that’s all it is,” she retorts angrily, her grip on her phone tightening. All of this, it sounds a lot like jealousy. She gets a girlfriend, and suddenly he’s calling, suddenly he’s _worried_ , meanwhile he’s been with the same girl for what, years now? He can’t expect that she stays right where he left her, just because he can’t deal seeing her with someone else. He can’t just have the parts of her he wants, pick and choose what he likes, and discard the rest like it’s garbage. She’s more than a warm body that he likes claiming as his.

“What are you talking about?”

He can figure it out himself. “I’m going to hang up now.”

Bellamy’s scoffing, “Real fucking m—”

The line beeps monotonously, and she slides her hands into her hair, leaning her elbows on her knees. At least a fight is better silence. Better than avoiding what they actually want to say again. Better than always biting her tongue. On her way back from her last class, she calls Wells. 

“He thinks she’s bad for me,” she complains, in a what-the-fuck-can-you-believe-this-guy voice. She shoves down the wrapper of her pre-packaged store-bought sandwich, taking an angry bite.

Wells scrapes his throat, clearly uncomfortable. “She is.”

“What?” She comes to halt in the middle of the quad. Out of all the things she expected him to say, it wasn’t that. He’s supposed to be in _her_ corner.

“You’re not yourself.” Clarke instantly deflates, her appetite gone. Not him too. “You’ve been distant. Reclusive. You’ve been dodging my Skype calls. This is the first time we’re even speaking this month.” He audibly opens his mouth, closes it. “Nevermind me, or Bellamy. When is the last time you’ve even picked up a brush, or a pencil?”

“I’ve been busy,” she answers, evasive, picking out a slice of tomato from her sandwich and tossing it inside one of the trashcans lining the cobblestone path. Classes are picking up, her final exams creeping closer. She’s doing pre-med for God’s sake, what do they expect? Just because she’s pushed aside her hobby—and it’s still a fucking hobby at the end of the day—for a bit doesn’t mean she’s turned into a complete stranger. 

“Too busy to answer our texts?” Wells doesn’t judge, he never does, but even he sounds a bit apprehensive right now.

She remains silent. Static crackles over the phone.

Finally, he sighs loudly, like he’s pulling out his last resort. “He didn’t want me to say anything, but you forgot his birthday, Clarke.”

“Fuck,” she breathes, gaining the attention of a group of students eating to-go dinners in a huddle on the field. Her eyes slam shut, her teeth gritting together as her palm slaps over her forehead. She can’t believe she forgot his birthday. No matter how close or far away from each other, or how strained their friendship might be at times, the very least she owed him was a ‘ _hey congrats_ ’ on Facebook, if only for old times’ sake. 

Clarke was going to give him this stupid keychain for his truck, a tacky heartshaped picture of him, Wells and her from three years ago, but she was half cut out of the frame on purpose. It was gonna be this whole funny meta thing, laughing on the phone together as soon as he received it in the mail. She ordered it online months ago. It’s somewhere, in one of her drawers, she thinks.

Wells softens. “Look, you never want to talk to me about Bellamy, and I get it, I do, but the two of you are only hurting each—”

“I was swamped,” she cuts him off, abruptly. “Last week, I had a bunch of essays due, and my chemistry TA was being a dick about a deadline, and Josie was stressing me out about our oral exams and, I — I just forgot, okay?” She sounds desperate, even to herself. 

Clarke knows she’s been pushing it, pushing herself. She’s been checking out, enthusiastically so. Allowing herself not to think so much, not to worry and overanalyze, and wearing herself out by spreading herself out so thin she barely had time to reconsider any of it. The thing with Lexa just felt so good, so right. For once, things seemed to work out exactly the way she wanted to, easily even, no feelings involved. Not real or important ones anyway. Applying that logic to the rest of her life probably wasn’t her brightest idea, retrospectively speaking.

“Just—if you say you’re fine, I believe you,” he gives her, because of course he does. He _is_ in her corner, always, which makes this whole thing even worse. He hesitates then, but eventually tells her, “Just remember that it starts with not making time to sketch, and forgetting a birthday, and then before you know it—”

She really doesn’t want to hear it. “I’ll make it up to him, somehow.” 

“I know you will. That’s not my point.”

“I _am_ fine,” Clarke reminds him, and he sighs, but doesn’t push it, because he’s Wells. 

She dumps the rest of the sandwich in the trash, licking a bit of mayonnaise off her thumb absentmindedly as she pulls up her texts. Shouldering her bag, she finally pushes her way inside her dorm building, thumbs too busy moving across her screen to really watch where she’s going. 

**Clarke [07:08 PM]**

_Sorry about earlier_

_And about forgetting your birthday_

_Handing the better friend card back over to you_

**Wells [07:09 PM]**

_Why did Bellamy just text me to call me a snitch_

Clarke rolls her eyes, ignoring him as she fishes for her keys to open her door. 

**Clarke [07:09 PM}**

_I’m sorry okay!!!!!!!!_

_It’s not an excuse but my classes were killing me_

_I bought you a birthday present though_

_And no i didn’t just buy something from the souvenir shop_

_Please, just tell me what i have to do to get you to forgive me_

_I’m desperate_

_I mean i’m like septuple texting you here, its embarrassing_

_TELL ME WHAT TO DO AND I’LL DO IT_

Over the years, she’s learned the best way to get Bellamy to talk to her if he’s annoyed is to a) cry, or b) annoy him back until he snaps. Works like a charm every time.

**Bellamy [07:16 PM]**

_Send nudes_

**Clarke [07:16 PM}**

_Cute_

**Bellamy [07:18 PM]**

_Seriously_

_You hung up on me like a twelve year old_

**Clarke [07:19 PM}**

_That’s why you’re mad?_

_Not your birthday???????_

_You’re holding the wrong grudges_

**Bellamy [07:22 PM]**

_I don’t care about my birthday Clarke_

_I care about you_

_You’re important to me_

_You’re what matters_

_Fuck my birthday_

_Stupid fucking Bellamy_ , she thinks, her heart tripping in her chest as she stares at her screen for a moment longer. Looks like he still knows all the right things to say. And because she’s incapable of expressing her feelings in a sincere, mature way, she flops down on her bed and shoves her shirt down her arm, sending him a snap of the curve of her bare shoulder.

**Clarke [07:24 PM]**

_There._

_Happy?_

**Bellamy [07:25 PM]**

_Would’ve been happier if there was a little less attitude involved_

**Clarke [07:25 PM]**

_I’ll ship your present tomorrow_

_First class mail and everything_

**Bellamy [07:26 PM]**

_Priority mail express, you’re literally loaded_

**Clarke [07:26 PM]**

_Priority mail_

**Bellamy [07:28 PM]**

_Priority mail express, final offer_

**Clarke [07:29 PM]**

_Fine_

_Dick_

She sends him another picture, this time of her ankle, for good measure, and he responds with a string of ironic tongue emojis, and then they spend the next two hours talking shit about the new season of Vikings while he live-texts her through the episodes she’s already seen, before the conversation dwindles to a natural end. Josie stumbles inside their room noisily, and Clarke realizes she hasn’t moved in a while. 

“God. It’s a school day and you’re awake after nine?” Josie marvels, mock-impressed, as she tosses her red designer jacket over her desk chair carelessly.

Clarke considers it, for a second. If there’s anyone who spends a lot of time with her, it’s her roommate. She pushes herself up on her elbows. “Do you think Lexa has changed me?”

With a dramatic long-suffering sigh, Josie falls back on her bed with a bounce, toeing off her snake print booties with a considerate humpfh. “I’ve been assuming you were doing another one of your mental breakdown spirals. I hadn’t realized it was related to her.” 

“It wasn’t,” she answers, then after a second realizes in a roundabout way maybe it was, and adds, “Not really.”

Josie gives a blasé roll of her eyes, holding up her phone above her face as her long thumbnails clack away on her screen, furiously typing away. “Not Bellamy again.”

“Not him either,” she lies, because she wants this conversation to be over already. She quite literally wants everybody to stop talking to her for a while, so she can recharge, figure out where her head’s at.

“Don’t tell me you fucked the other guy too.”

Clarke’s eyes widen, not even able to physically comprehend the mess she’d be in if they had dragged Wells into this too. “No!”

“Shame,” she tuts, gaze fixed straight on her phone. “My respect for you just almost peaked to new heights.”

Clarke sighs, dropping her head back onto her pillow. She stares at the glow-in-the-dark stars she put up on her ceiling freshman year to remind her of the nights she spent dissecting constellations with her dad. The old, faded yellow stickers hardly compare to a mess of millions of twinkling lights in the vast dark blue night sky, but the sentiment’s nice. She’s playing a lot of make-believe with second-best material these days. “We had a fight. I forgot his birthday.”

“I assume you haven’t made up?” She deadpans, bored.

She shifts her head on her pillow to blink at Josie, it hadn’t occurred to her before that it was strange he just glossed over it like that. She took the least difficult way out and didn’t try to examine it any further. Now, unease starts to barb beneath her skin. “We have.”

Her roommate snorts, unimpressed, frowning at something on her feed before it turns into a smirk instead. “Did you find a way to virtually suck his dick or something?”

Clarke gets strangely defensive. “No, I texted him an apology and we talked it out. He doesn’t really care that much about his birthday anyway, so—”

Josie’s winged amber eyes catch hers, raising her eyebrows. Apparently _this_ piqued her interest enough to look away from her phone for longer than two seconds. “So he was over it, just like that? Didn’t even milk it a little bit? Make you sweat for a few hours?”

“He’s my friend,” she argues, lame and doubtful, even to her own ears. “Of course he wouldn’t hold a grudge against me.”

“You forgot his birthday, doll. His _birthday_.” Judgement drips from her voice, but not particularly directed at Clarke. More like she’s mad at Bellamy on her behalf. “You sent him a few lousy texts and he forgave you. _Supes_ normal.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that and it’s not like Josie is waiting around expecting an answer, because it’s only a moment before she starts mouthing along to some pop song playing from her phone and their conversation is now decidedly past tense.

Clarke just turns around on her bed with her back to her roommate, staring at the wall as she hugs her arms to herself. Josie is right. Nothing about this is normal. Bellamy has always had trouble staying angry with her for long, but he’s had no qualms in the past about tearing into her when she needed it most. Forgetting his birthday is definitely prime tearing into her material. It’s scraping his car, missing his basketball championship finale, arguing with his sister over her selfishness _material_. She feels foolish, all of a sudden, for being elated they could just move past it, when in reality it just means he’s stopped caring about her all together. His indifference might as well be a big fat _‘fuck you’._

The truth is, she got left behind. Bellamy couldn’t wait to move on, Wells did too even if he’ll never say it in so many words, and she’ll be here forever, pining after someone who doesn’t want her, who doesn’t love her like she loves him, who replaced her, who now has other priorities, waiting for him to change his mind.

The next morning, she provokes him. It’s the best way she knows how to deal with it, this fucking gaping ache in the middle of her chest telling her they really are broken beyond repair. Taunting her, all through the night. She’s barely gotten a wink of sleep, the disconcerning unease she felt before quickly settling into a quiet rage, blood boiling in her veins at his passiveness. She’s been oblivious, to an extent, perhaps to protect her own feelings, but it’s clear to her now.

“All of this is fucking bullshit,” she starts the call, and she knows she’s woken him up because it’s two hours earlier where he is, and his groggy voice is infused with sleep when he answers, “What?”

“I forgot your birthday.”

He sighs heavily, bed sheets rustling in the background. A bedspring creaks. “We’ve gone over this.”

“I want to go over it again,” she bites, petulant, like he should just be able to understand where this is coming from, all of a sudden. This is probably very erratic, but _that’s_ who they are — not this controlled, composed version of them they’re trying to be.

Bellamy’s voice is rough, a door shutting behind him. Maybe he was asleep beside Roma, or not trying to wake his roommate, but the very reason she’s holding back from asking him is why she’s having this conversation with him right now. “Clarke, why? What’s going on?”

She swallows hard, then explains, hollow even to her own ears, “You don’t get angry with me anymore.”

He just sounds confused and it makes everything worse. It wasn’t even a conscious decision on his part, they really have grown distant. Grown so distant they’re full of forged politeness and unnatural restraint and _bullshit._ “You want me to be angry with you?”

Sadness seeps into the cracks in her chest, threatening to cut off her air supply. “If we were still friends you would be mad at me.” 

“We _are_ still friends, aren’t we?” He starts, and if she didn’t know him so well she would’ve missed the slight edge to his voice. She comes to the realisation that she might have already lost him, and it strikes her like a blow to her chest, ice in her veins. Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. He grows more restless, frantic, “Aren’t we?”

“I forgot your birthday. I’ve been distant, ignoring your texts, cutting our phone calls short—” She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Maybe it’s a last pathetic attempt at getting him to say something real.

“What do you want from me here, Clarke?” Bellamy grits out, but somehow it’s soft, defeated. They’re getting nowhere. 

For the first time, she’s at a loss for words. She used to want a lot of things from him. A hug, an apology, a phone call, some space, more time, his fingers inside of her, his obnoxious snores, every stupid thought, listening to the same song together thirty-six times in a row, to sit with him in silence, his secrets, a pep talk, for him to read her mind, to crawl inside of him, to get as far away from him as possible, a laugh, a smile, tears, to be the first person he calls on a bad day, to be the reason he has a bad day, to listen to him breathe as she falls asleep. A real fucking conversation. Clarke’s reached her breaking point, perhaps a long time ago, but she’s been ignoring it, for the sake of preserving whatever it is they still have left. The ruins of them. But she’s exhausted, physically, from tiptoeing around him, balancing on this tightrope between them and she’s not sure she can keep doing this. Maybe she’s past the crippling fear of losing him, and closer to accepting it’s already happened when she wasn’t watching. When she was hiding from the truth. Her throat sore from standing her ground and her eyes stinging from angry, unshed tears, she whispers, “I don’t know.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know,” Clarke confesses, feeling a new sort of calm wash over her. It’s out there, finally.

He takes in a shaky breath. Brokingly pleads, “I don’t want to lose you.”

Her throat works hard to get past the lump in her throat, but she feels like there’s nothing left to say. That there is nothing she _can_ say, her mouth like cotton.

Bellamy’s voice is thick with tears, and somehow the image of him standing in the hallway of his dorm in the middle of the night, with his hair a mess, just in his boxers, tears pooling in his brown eyes is what does her in. “I _can’t_ lose you,” he rasps, desperate, begging, not thinking straight because it cripples him just the same. “I’ve been stupid, okay? It’s my fault. I’ve been pushing you away and keeping my distance, convincing myself that I don’t need you anymore, and that’s all on me. I’ll do better, I’ll, I’ll do anything. Please. I’ll call you everyday, I’ll break up with her, I’ll come, come see you.” Every word is like a knife slicing into her chest, thick blood filling her lungs, clawing up her constricted throat. “Because I do. I fucking do need you. I need you more than anyone else. You’re not just my best friend, you’re my, my _family_ , Clarke, you’re—”

“Okay,” she cuts him off hoarsely, a crack in the middle of the word, squeezing her eyes shut as warm tears slide down her cheeks. She can’t keep listening to this, can’t stand idly by while his heart breaks, can’t be the reason why. Her entire body is shaking and she can’t breathe, terror gnawing at her insides. “Okay.”

Bellamy sniffs, probably reeling from her sudden change in demeanor. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she echoes. She still _has_ him, he hasn’t let her go. It’s selfish of her to make him, to demand that of him, no matter how much it hurts. No matter how many empty promises she has to make. “We’ll both do better.”

A relieved sound passes from his lips on the other side of the line, and there’s a loud thump she can’t quite place. “Clarke…” With bated breath, she braces herself, but in the end all he says is, “You’ll always be important to me, you know that, right?”

She reaches up to swipe at her runny nose. It’s like they’re doomed to be stuck in this endless cycle of breaking and healing, of being torn apart and coming back together, with no way out. Their own personal purgatory. “You’re important to me, too.”

“Then that’s all that matters, right?”

Right. Even if it kills them.

┇

The thing with Lexa is on/off, and it’s the latter all during summer. Clarke declines to come back to work for the doctor’s office because she misses her mom and her friends, instead finds a job at a nursing home back home and opens her commissions on Tumblr back up for the time being, and Lexa is backpacking through Asia with some of her slam poetry club acquaintances. Besides, they’re not serious enough to actually visit each other when they’re not in a ten mile radius of each other. That would mean they cared and they’re still doing the whole thing where they pretend they’re only hooking-up because it’s convenient, and Clarke is fine with it. It’s not like she’s that attached. 

Her first week back there’s a carnival downtown to raise money in honour of the public high school’s football team, to get them new jerseys for next season, which means it’ll be packed with jocks and their way more talented cheerleader girlfriends. Wells uncharacteristically is the one who suggests they go, buys them tickets behind their backs and forces them to take sips of the flask he’s filled with rum he’s most definitely stolen from Mr. Jahas liquor cabinet all night.

Bellamy shakes his head, half laughing as he watches their friend attempt the ladder climb against a twelve year old, badly. Like _losing_ badly. Embarrassingly badly. “What has gotten into him?” 

“I don’t know.” Wells still insists they’re just friends whenever she asks, but she’s been able to gather some information from in between the lines and in the unsaid. (Stalking his crush’s Instagram too.) She flinches as the ladder twists and he makes a deep-dive, face first, taking the little girl down with him. “I think Delilah is seeing their school’s local party boy and he’s comparing himself.”

Bellamy tears his eyes off the uncoordinated mess of limbs tangled with ropes, of his loudly sister encouraging Wells’ behaviour from the sidelines, raising his eyebrows at her. “Should we be worried?”

“No,” she decides after considering it for a beat. Wells is responsible and aggravatingly moral, even while spiraling. If a little barely-underage drinking and petty theft from family members is the worst of it, he’ll be fine. Brushing off his concerns, and perhaps the lingering remainder of her own, “You know him. He’ll wake up hungover tomorrow, realize he has his own strengths, and decide that if friendship is all she needs from him this moment in time, he can provide that for her.” Clarke’s mouth curves up, affectionate. “He’ll get a think-piece on the importance of platonic love published by the time we even roll out of bed.”

“Send handwritten apology notes to every vendor at this fair,” Bellamy fills in, matching her smile.

“You get it.”

Octavia ditches them halfway through the evening to go make out with a senior behind the ferris wheel and Bellamy’s jaw doesn’t unset until Clarke challenges him to a skee ball competition. She loses, not on purpose, but he lets her have the tacky hot pink butterfly ring made from plastic he got as a prize and makes her buy them an illegal amount of corn dogs. They try the bumper cars, which is fun, then get an abundance of weird looks from families while loudly (and perhaps drunkenly) climbing the steps inside the helter skelter, decidedly less fun, and finally the tilt-a-whirl, lots of vomit. There’s an abandoned tent in the back with disco lights and a karaoke machine, and by the time the flask is nearly bottomed out, Wells drags them over there and does a stellar rendition of ‘Think Twice’ that has her near peeing her pants and gets her enough blackmail material to last her for years to come. Bellamy ends up paying the whack-a-mole guy ten bucks to lie and say the carnival’s closing up so Wells’ finally allows them to leave. 

It takes them twice as long as usual to get home because Wells keeps getting distracted by garden gnomes and stray cats and he passes out on the grass in front of the Jahas house before they can get inside. While Bellamy tries to haul his dead weight off the ground in his own half-inebriated state, Clarke, recognizing a lost battle when she sees one, just plops down beside her oldest friend, sprawling herself out on her back and tipping her head back to look up at the splatters of silver stars across the midnight sky. Her body feels heavy, tired, but in a good way.

“I didn’t know he was working out this much,” Bellamy complains with his hands on his hips, panting softly as he looks down at Wells’ unconscious form like he’s been personally betrayed. His cheeks are flushed from drinking, probably exertion too. “He’s put on a lot of muscle.”

“Delilah likes pilates, so he’s been going with her every Tuesday night.” She turns her head, watches him sigh in defeat as he stretches backward over the grass, the hem of his crew neck tee moving up to show a sliver of light brown skin. 

He whistles mockingly. “With the pace he’s going at they’ll be having their first kiss sometime next decade.”

Clarke rolls her eyes, half-hearted. “I think it’s sweet that he's taking it slow with her. They’re friends—” He’s not doing anything wrong. He probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it. He’s just looking at her, covered in the dim glow of the small light post by the driveway, something flickering in his deep brown eyes that she doesn’t dare to start to decipher. It’s like this every time they’re alone together now, which is admittedly not that often since she spends a lot of her time avoiding situations like this. It makes her skin prick with more feelings she also doesn’t want to decipher. “Stop looking at me like that.”

His brows pinch together, puzzled expressions on his face. “I’m not looking at you like anything.” She can’t help but notice the way the muscles in his neck work as he speaks and it makes her feel unbalanced. She’s not supposed to notice those things anymore. 

He still doesn’t stop, and maybe sober Clarke could’ve ignored it, but this Clarke is just annoyed. He can no longer claim he doesn’t know when she just told him he’s doing it. “I’m trying to have a normal conversation with you.”

“So talk.” He huffs, his breath smelling like the sweet caramel aftertaste of the rum they drank.

“I can’t concentrate when you look at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything.” His nostrils flare. “This is just my face.”

Her eyes narrow. “I hope you know it’s a stupid face.”

“Sure,” Bellamy counters smugly, with a sarcastic edge that sets her off.

She grits her teeth, remaining silent, finds it not at all difficult to shake the unbidden thoughts of him out of her traitorous brain when he’s being this annoying. Finds it _way_ more difficult to understand why they were even there in the first place.

Wells groans, strained, like a dying animal. “Guys,” he drawls, sluggishly, lifting his head up. There’s a trail of drool down the corner of his mouth, a blade of grass stuck to his eyebrow. “I totally got chewed out by a little blonde girl today.”

“Believe me buddy, we saw,” Bellamy humours him with the ghost of a chuckle, probably remembering the same twelve year old by the ladder climb yelling about selfish, stinky old people, her face red. She was sort of right, but she didn’t need to be so rude about it. “Octavia was rooting for her.”

There’s another drawn-out grunt, and Bellamy is sitting up and reaching over her to push against his thigh, telling him, “Hey. _Hey._ Stay awake,” but Wells just mumbles something into the grass, out cold in record-time. She lifts herself onto her elbows, raising her brows. “You take feet, I do arms?”

Rolling his shoulders back, Bellamy only considers it for a second. “I did feet last time,” he reminds her, and she does remember. When Octavia secretly threw that rager while Theo was out of town that got way out of hand until eventually the cops were called on them by Clarke’s very own mother. One of his sister’s friends Jasper ate too many slices of space cake in one go, and keeled over face first in the pool while sirens were blasting in the distance, which was like two years ago so she feels like it’s hit it’s statute of limitations. “It’s your turn.”

Clarke pretends to give it an honest shot, even though her mind’s already made up, then purses her lips, brattily. “I’m doing arms, _or_ I go home so you can wake up Theo and you can be on the receiving end of those beady little disappointed eyes for the next two and a half hours while he lectures you on responsibility and maturity.”

“He’ll get pneumonia if we leave him out here,” Bellamy argues, his nose scrunching up as he offers a third option.

Unbothered by his tactics, she makes a skillful demur, “That’s not how pneumonia works.”

“Fine,” he groans, slowly rising to his feet, wiping the dirt on his hands on the back of his jeans. He wavers only for a second, his body most likely readjusting to the sudden change of position, before he offers her a hand to pull her up. She’s dizzy too, but he holds onto her fingers and curls his other hand around her elbow, until the initial wave of nausea passes, and her face gets some of it’s color back. That rum hit harder then expected.

His thumb unconsciously runs over the butterfly on her middle finger, smirking down at her in amusement. “You alright there, princess?”

Her traitorous brain only seems to be capable of straying for so long, her eyes lingering on the smooth brown skin of his arm not covered by his t-shirt. It remembers how hard it felt under her touch, how small her hand looked in comparison when it was curled around it, which happened often when he was on top of her, moving inside of her. She shakes her head to get rid of the invasive memory, even if it makes her stomach twist and turn as if they’re out at sea. “Ask me again in the morning.”

“Baby,” he says suddenly, startling her like a newborn fawn. His glazy eyes gleam with boyish mischief. “Don’t say what you’re about to say.”

Suddenly, it clicks. Clarke shoves him with all the force of a — newborn fawn, still wobbly on her feet. He’s laughing, like the asshole he is, but she just flicks her eyes up at the dark blue heavens. “Yeah, yeah. Look back before you leave my life. Be sure before you close that door.”

“Baby, think twice,” he croons, horribly off-key, still laughing at himself as he bends down to take a firm hold of their friend’s ankles. He hums along with the high notes. “Think twice.”

She huffs from exertion as she wraps her fingers around his wrist, her back muscles protesting with agony as they hoist him up off the grass. Just a few inches first, then on their second try enough to start walking without permanently injuring his brain. “Hey,” she grunts. “Pretty sure you’re Pied Piper’ing all the vermin in a ten mile radius.”

“Stop talking about my magic pipe, princess. We’re with company.”

They haul Wells as far as the living room sofa, and then she passes out in his unoccupied bed without bothering to change out of her clothes, the corners of her mouth curled up with the hint of a smile against his silk pillow. Clarke can’t help but think tonight felt a little like old times. Even if they are over, it feels good to revisit them every once in a while.

Halfway through June, Mr. Pike—named after the geography teacher Octavia hates, proud owner of the pettiest of streaks just like her brother—dies. They hold a small funeral in their backyard, burying him in a shoe box by one of the trees, and Clarke’s not sure what to do when halfway through her speech, Octavia turns around and falls forward into her arms, crying.

On the fourth of July, they go to the park with their families to watch the fireworks, dragging over a barbeque to eat enough shrimp skewers off the grill until they’re sick with it. Her mom leaves an hour after they finish dinner because of the frosty weather, but Marcus and Theo stay around to ‘keep an eye’ on them even though they’re just standing around drinking beer and most likely pretending they’re two regular dudes making medium-wage like they’re not a senator and judge respectively. 

Roma is visiting for the week. They’re kissing on the blanket a few feet away from where her and Wells are sitting, and when Clarke glances over at them like the sick masochist she is, Bellamy’s eyes flutter open as if he can sense her gaze on him. Her restless mind buzzes, feeling disjointed, fractured, yet she physically can’t avert her eyes. Roma jolts away from him in surprise when the first fireworks bloom across the sky, a peal of magical laughter rolling off her lips as she leans into her boyfriend, but Bellamy is still looking at her instead, his adam’s apple bobbing up and down slowly.

The bright sparks of light reflect in his eyes and cover his skin in a kaleidoscope of colors, and she thinks he’s so fucking gorgeous it hurts. She watches him lick his lips before he finally drags his eyes up to the sky, and just like that it’s over again — whatever that charged moment between them was — like it was never even there to start with. Clarke blinks at him a few seconds longer before gazing down at her feet, and then off to the side, shaking her head a little as her shoulders slump forward. 

“You’re not as subtle as you think you are, you know that, right?” Wells muses, his forearm cold as it knocks into hers. Again, he’s not judging, only making an observation.

She’s gotten good at playing stupid. Ever since they admitted that they need each other, it’s pushed them, barrelled them back towards some of the lines they carefully avoided before. Sometimes it still haunts her dreams at night. _I’ll break up with her._ He wasn’t thinking straight, obviously, telling her what she wanted to hear, most likely, but it still found it’s way into her head, planting firm, stubborn roots there. She used to look at Roma with such childish envy, such all-consuming jealousy, now Clarke just feels sorry for her. “I don’t know what you're talking about.“

He lets out a little skeptical hum, but drops it. Clarke can’t shake that look in Bellamy’s eyes off as easily. 

┇

Early September, Josie starts planning her twenty-first birthday party for her, excited about putting their off-campus apartment to good use for the first time. It’s going to be a weekend long affair against Clarke’s deepest wishes — she doesn’t _like_ parties, being the centre of attention, or most people — but at least it means it’s a big enough deal it warrants an invitation to her friends. 

Near the end of one of their calls, she worries her bottom lip so hard she almost breaks the skin and then asks Bellamy, “Do you think you’ll come?”

“Of course I’ll come,” he tells her, gruff. “I came to Wells’, didn’t I?” Like that’s even remotely the same thing.

Clarke rolls her eyes, even if he can’t see. “His birthday party was just us three drinking IPAs on the roof of my house and Facebook fact-checking our high school superlatives. It didn’t include you having to fly across the country for a couple of days in the middle of a semester.”

“Relax, Clarke,” he emphasizes, a teasing tone to his voice. “I’ll be there.”

“You can bring Roma, you know,” she tells him, mostly as an afterthought, but also because he might want to. It’s also an olive branch in disguise, she tells _herself_. She did promise him she’d do better, and accepting Roma as part of his life is probably a step into the right direction. “I won’t mind,” she prods, when all that remains on the other end is static. Jokingly adds, “Maybe she can make being around Josie for more than an hour bearable.”

“Uhm, yeah, that’s okay,” he brushes her off, finally, and she can’t help the little thrill of satisfaction she feels at realizing that maybe he doesn’t want her there after all. “Like you said, it’s just a couple of days.”

She texts Lexa after, to make sure she’s coming too, just in case he does end up bringing his girlfriend. It’s not a competition, but it would suck infinitely times more for him to have a safety net in place and for her to hang on by the skin of her teeth the whole night. _Also_ because Lexa probably should’ve been higher on her priority list to start with, and because she wasn’t, Clarke overcompensates and spends the next thirty minutes sexting with her. 

It’s no trouble actually. Lexa takes really tasteful nude photos, and she’s obviously very pretty. Lately she’s even been mellowing out a little more, coming out of her shell, sharing more of herself. There’s even foreplay now, most of the time, and sometimes she stays over afterwards.

The party is amazing. There’s colorful streamers, and expensive rose-gold balloons, a photobooth in the corner, and lots and lots of booze. Their apartment is packed by the time it’s nine, and she’s not entirely sure she even knows all these people, and the neighbours probably hate them, but she dances filthily with Josie and plays quarters with Wells and there’s a red velvet birthday cupcake who’s frosting somehow ends up all over her jaw and all in all, it’s a pretty great night.

Then, once she is a little tipsy and finds Lexa, suddenly things are a smidge less amazing. They snuck off to her room, and they’re kissing — her tongue hot in her mouth, tasting like wine and carrot cake and something fruity that was in the shot they did earlier together — and Clarke just feels so warm with all her favorite people around, and so grateful, so full in the best of ways, and she realizes how stupid she’s been pretending like she doesn’t feel anything all the time, and she likes Lexa, likes her so much, likes her more than she’s been letting on, and she wishes she could be around her all the time, that they could have more than scheduled stolen moments and fleeting heated touches, that she could take her to the movies and hold her hand in public and meet that sister of hers she idiolizes so much, and she’s so busy thinking about all of this, about this fantasy of what they could be, of all the possibilities lying in their future, of in what ways her life could be so much better, she doesn’t even notice when her mouth pulls back from Lexa’s and says, hot breath fanning across her pale face, “You should be my girlfriend.”

Immediately, Clarke knows it was the wrong thing to say. Her limbs feel weak, her stomach twists, her veins flooding with anxiety — all of that in the split second before Lexa even freezes on top of her. She sits back on her heels, shoving her shirt back down her stomach. Her emerald eyes dart around, obviously looking for an escape route. Clarke catches her fingers with hers, looking up at her with glazy eyes. “Sorry.”

It’s too late. She only scowls at her, snatching back her hand as she gets off the bed. “We promised not to do this, Clarke.”

“I said I’m sorry,” she bites back, although most of the heat is lost in translation between her frazzled braind and her stupid, running mouth. “I didn’t — I never. _Ugh_.” Clarke makes a noise of frustration, pushing herself up on her knees. It crept up on her, against her will, against everything inside of her telling her not to, but it’s there, and it’s real, and she’s tired of pretending it couldn’t be more than sex. She _deserves_ more than sex. She knows Lexa feels it too. “It just happened okay? I didn’t mean to like you. I tried not to and it, it worked for a very long time, but I think it could be good, you know? If we gave—” Clarke stops at the expression on her face, her heart dropping to her stomach. “It _is_ good.”

Lexa swipes her hammer and sickle adorned tote up off the floor, a cold, vindictive look in her eyes. “And now it’s ruined.”

“Just come back here, I’m sorry,” she pleads, patting the bed beside her, giving her a weak, soft smile even if it wavers around the edges. Clarke’s really not one to beg, but it’s her birthday, and she doesn’t want them to end like this. “We’ll pretend I never said any—”

“No,” she seethes, wiping at the smudged dark charcoal underneath her eyes tiredly with her thumb and forefinger as she shakes her head a little. When her gaze drags up to meet Clarke’s she can tell nothing good is about to follow. “You should’ve kept it to yourself! You were selfish, and now...” A pained expression splits across her symmetrical face, briefly, her plum colored lips pressed together in a thin line.

“Now what?” Clarke presses, quiet, hands limp besides her thighs on the mattress. She already knows. 

“Now we’re done.”

Lexa slams the door behind her and Clarke sits there for another minute before dragging herself up off the bed. It’s _her_ birthday party, and she’s not going to feel shitty for the rest of the night. She slips back into the living room only to be overwhelmed by the amount of people there when she still feels like an exposed nerve, jaded by the unavoidable turn her love life always seems to take, ashamed about the vulnerabilities she revealed to Lexa with reckless abandon, so she makes her way out onto the firescape. The crisp air helps sober her up, the wind rustling her hair as she takes a deep breath in through her nose.

The door slides open behind her, but she doesn’t turn, keeping her eyes fixed on a building up ahead,haloed by the pale, silver moon behind it.

“How's it feel to be amongst us twenty-one year olds?” It’s Bellamy, coming up beside her, and when she shifts to look at him his smile dims, face falling. “Hey, you okay?”

For a second she considers lying, telling him some bullshit excuse about being tired. But he’ll be able to see through her, and then when he inevitably finds out what happened, he’ll think she doesn’t want to discuss this kind of stuff with him and that she’s still hung up on him like that or something. Also, she just really wants to talk to him about it. “Me and Lexa broke it off. I—I asked her to take the next step or whatever, I guess.” She looks off to the side, fingers tightening around her opposite elbows until her nails turn a pale white. “She didn’t agree.”

He remains silent, his jaw set. But his brown eyes seem sympathetic, kind.

“I really liked her,” Clarke lets herself admit out loud for the first time, which is strange, since the reason she couldn’t like anyone for so long was him. The first time she tries, it blows up in her face. Evidently, like the universe is pulling some sick joke on her, Lexa seems to be right. Why get attached? She’s cursed.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and sounds genuine even. His reaches up to squeeze her shoulder, amicably.

There’s a beat, and then she sighs, shaking her head to herself as her hands fly out to curl around the iron railing, holding up her weight as she slumps forward a bit. “Maybe I should accept friends with benefits is not my thing.” 

His hand drops back down, fingers twitching at his side. “Probably.” It sounds like he’s trying for a joke, but it just falls flat.

Silence stretches heavily between them, and she wishes they could just skip to the part where they can kid around about how that used to be them too. Where none of this has to be so goddamn difficult. Where their conversations don’t have to keep hitting a dead-end.

Clarke tightens her fingers around the railing then lets her hands fall down. She huffs, left-over resentment from earlier with Lexa coursing through her veins. She’s not even mad at him. She’s just mad at herself, and this situation she keeps ending up in. It radiates off her, probably, but he doesn’t leave. Instead, he seems just as angry, teeth gritted together, shoulders tense, fingers curled into fists. They’re dancing around it, but she’s tired of it and they said they would stop doing that.

“Why are _you_ mad?” She asks, some of her frustrations melting away and making place for genuine amusement.

He makes a noise that’s a mixture between frustration and indignance. “Because she broke up with you. On your birthday.” Bellamy’s teeth grit together in a way that must be painful. “I’m not mad, I’m homicidal. I want to kill her.”

She blinks at him in surprise. “It’s okay. Truly. She told me what this was, at the beginning. I was just too stubborn to listen.” Too fucking stubborn to take her own track record in account. Wells, Finn, Gaia, she fucked all of that up. Even—even what she and Bellamy had. Lexa is just another name on her list.

Bellamy scoffs, unimpressed. Apparently he’s not having it. “On your birthday though? Couldn’t she just have faked it for another twelve hours?”

Clarke bites back a smile. “To be fair I was the one to bring it up.”

He sighs, relenting, and then softens a little at the sad pout on her face. He drapes his arm around her, and she leans into him, resting her head against the junction of his chest and shoulder as they stare out at the moon, covering them it’s pale light, the only sound the distant noise of the party inside and cars quietly passing by below in the dark of night. It’s nice, comforting, and she does feel better. He always makes her feel like she isn’t carrying her burdens alone.

After a moment, he breaks the quiet, prompting a thoughtful, “Did you want to work it out with her?”

“I mean, yeah?” Clarke stiffens, and part of her feels like she’s been caught in a trap. She knows what he’s wondering about, because she’s wondered the same thing herself. Maybe she self-sabotaged the minute she felt Lexa get too close. “I think so.”

She doesn’t shift to meet his pointed gaze, not ready to leave his side and break out of the comfort of their bubble just yet, but feels the weight of it nonetheless. “Maybe you can give something a real shot, one of these days?”

She doesn’t want to give anything a real shot when none of it measures up. She wonders if it’ll ever stop feeling like half of her is missing. He might look at her a little too long every now and then, might like the thrill of being caught by his girlfriend, might be tempted by the memory of her body and the promise of unconditional acceptance, confuse the familial duty for love, and the lust for something even worse, but it’s not like what she feels for him. It can’t be, when he still rules her body, her mind, her heart — even now. Especially now. When there’s no real ache but instead a temporary reprieve, there’s the phantom of it, haunting her, tauntingly reminding her it could be back within seconds, with one word, one touch, one look unlocking a memory she pushed away and tucked away somewhere deep inside of her a long time ago. It’s obvious he doesn’t feel the same way, if he’s pushing her to want _real_ things. Unlike them, she guesses, that will always be a farfetched fantasy. 

Clarke licks her lips, pressing her cold nose into the crook of his neck, burying into his warmth for just a selfish second longer. “Maybe.”

┇

At the end of their winter break, Clarke sneaks Wells and Bellamy into one of her mother’s boring fundraiser galas thrown in honour of the hospital she works at. She’s already missed Christmas because her mom insisted on taking her on a trip to go see Kane’s extended family halfway across the country, so she’s allowing herself to make the most of the time she still has left with them. Before it’s back to her classes and torturous exams, and she’s swamped with wrapping up her final year of college. Besides, it’s mostly for old times sake, when she would drag one of them to accompany her as her plus one all the time. They used to do rock, paper, scissors not to decide who could go with her, but who could get out of it. These events are torture, always have been, but slightly more bearable with one of your best friends at your side. 

That remains true, even years later. 

Clarke wears a fancy baby blue dress and a way too expensive diamond family heirloom around her neck and gets embarrassingly drunk on champagne within the first hour. Wells asks her to dance, and mid-twirl promptly drops her, just as drunk, and in her clumsiness she drags him down with her. Bellamy’s laughing so hard at their expense that they’re getting glared at by the suit and ties, and Abby comes over to tell them to behave with one of those stern mother looks she must have practiced in the mirror. Naturally, Clarke steals an entire bottle of champagne in retaliation and makes Wells and Bellamy chase after her into the night.

They end up in the abandoned parking lot behind the hospital and climb on top of the bed of Bellamy’s truck with her squeezed in the middle of the two of them, their arms pressed tightly together, staring up at the indigo sky as they pass the bottle around. 

“Your mom is actually terrifying when she wants to be,” Bellamy notes, aghast, curls falling into his eyes despite the fact his head is tipped back slightly to take in the plethora of little glittery crystals scattered across the heavens, his jacket draped over his lap.

“Remember those two years he kept insisting on calling her ma'am?” Wells chuckles, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he swallows a sip, holding the bottle out for Clarke. His cufflinks catch on the moonlight; two silver stormtrooper shaped jewels. Nerd.

Clarke laughs loudly, the thin strap of her dress falling down her shoulder. The skirt’s so puffy, it’s half-sprawled over all their legs. “God, Mr, Whatever The Hell I Want secretly craved her approval so much.”

Bellamy snatches the bottle from Wells before she can, curling his fingers tightly around the neck of the bottle, taking a large swig. “Cute,” he grunts, peeved.

“Next year everything’s going to be different,” she muses, still high on laughter, tucking a wild strand of hair away from her sparkling blue eyes. Up there, she spots Boötes, but she keeps it a secret. Her carefully styled up do is a frizzy mess by now and the corset of her dress is digging into her skin uncomfortably, but all she feels is a relieved kind of solace. They made it this far.

“What do you mean?” Her oldest friend poses, puzzled look on his face, like he can’t even fathom the thought that someday nothing might be the same. As if he can single-handedly stop the process of their body cells replicating and replacing themselves every seven years, make sure that they’re always a part of each other, come hell or high water.

“Think about it, Wells.” She nudges him. He and his girlfriend have been moving fast, looking at apartments together and making decisions about their future with each other in mind. They’re all going to graduate. Go their separate ways, _again_. Nights like these will be rare, maybe they won’t ever happen again. Perhaps they’re experiencing lasts without even knowing it. “You and Delilah could be married.”

“Baby on the way,” Bellamy fills in, teasingly. He wraps his discarded jacket over her shoulders, and when she glances down at the only part of her left uncovered, her collarbone and chest, and sees it covered in goosebumps, and then sees how her fingernails have turned a deep purple, she realizes why. 

The both of them snort, bursts of short laughter infused with shared giddiness over their friend’s guaranteed embarrassment, but Wells just rolls his eyes. “We’re taking it slow.”

Bellamy rails it in, just long enough to arch a brow and ask, “Her request or yours?”

He opens his mouth, but his eyes betray him, however glazed over they are, which he seems to realize, too, because then he grudgingly admits, “Hers.”

He hisses in return, running a hand through his hair, near-empty bottle long forgotten on his other side. “Now you finally know how Luna felt with you blue balling her for so long.”

Wells growls, grumpy. “Shut up.”

“I really love you guys,” Clarke marvels, sluggishly, putting her cheek against Bellamy’s arm as she throws her arm around Wells’ shoulders to pull him toward her chest, which ends up being more of a headlock than anything else, slightly rocking them.

Wells _thinks_ he’s giving Bellamy a discreet look as he tries to unlock her arm from his neck, but it’s far from. Perhaps that’s even the point. “I think it’s time we get her home.”

“I almost forgot seven drink Clarke is when she starts to get clingy and overly mushy.”

A huff, mock-horrified. “One more and she’s going to start stripping.”

“We can spare another ten minutes,” Bellamy jokes, snatching up the bottle and offering it to her. She licks her lips and stares at it dazedly, not sure what’s so funny, and Wells actually bursts out laughing. Her heart feels warm, and full, and no longer a heavy weight in her chest, and she doesn’t care that she’s drunk or that their lives are changing forever and they’re going to be adults with boring lives and responsibilities and she won’t be their number one priority any more.

Clarke takes both of their hands in hers, cheeks flushed from all the champagne, kissing the back of each of them with loud satisfying smacks. “I’m really glad both of you exist.”

They might not always like it, but they’re glad she exists too, she knows that much, and that night, succumbing to the darkness of sleep has never felt so sweet.

┇

Late May, Clarke graduates. 

For the first time in her life, she has no concrete plans for the future. She decided not to apply to med schools last year just yet, taking a few months to make up her mind on whether or not that is definitely the direction she wanted her life to take, or at the very least take the time to recharge before going through four years of literal hell. Wells is going to go to law school on the other side of the country, and Bellamy is looking for jobs in their hometown. Clarke’s not sure where she wants to go. Josie offers her a job at some high-end facility she’s going to be working at in Italy for the next year before doing her Masters in Biology, which is tempting, but if Clarke does end up wanting to apply to a few med schools interviews for them would start in September. Besides, her mom is selling the house, and is moving to DC at the end of the summer because Kane got elected as the Vice Chair of something important at the Capitol, and Clarke wants to say goodbye to the house before it belongs to someone else and all her childhood memories are gone with the wind too. Everything is up in the air, and it’s a little unsettling but it’s also freeing, in a way. 

She figures she can at least take the summer, to figure it out. Where she wants to go, where she wants to put up her roots. Spend some time with her best friends. Do some soul-searching. Laze around for a few weeks. The last few months of college were hard, and she deserves a break. 

In true Octavia fashion, she has to take summer classes to get enough credits for a late graduation at the end of June. Bellamy doesn’t even know what a periodic table is, so Clarke swallows her pride and sacrifices her time to help her pass her Science classes, and Mr. Jaha throws her a big garden party two days after they get the news miracles do still exist and she passed. 

There’s a five tier cake with her face on it, and purple balloons mounted all around the white outdoor canopy, and an ice sculpture in the shape of a butterfly. Bellamy finds her admiring the shiny gold banner spelling out ‘ _CHEERS B*TCHES_ ’ from the corner, handing her a drink as they look out at Octavia dancing with her friends to an early 2000s Britney Spears song. Always loved being the centre of attention, that one.

“He must be really glad she’s moving away to college,” Clarke muses, one arm folded around her waist as she cradles the glass in her other hand. She’s wearing a pretty lilac summer dress with little flowers on it, her shorter hair pulled back from her face on the sides. 

Bellamy laughs, shoving one of his hands into his pocket. “Wouldn’t you be?”

Obviously, but she’s definitely biased. Octavia wasn’t as bad during their tutor sessions as she had expected her to be though, even if that might have just been related to the fact she wanted to graduate, so a backhanded compliment is as much as Clarke manages. “She’s definitely mellowed out a little over the past years.”

“Sometimes this is all still so fucking surreal to me,” he says, shaking his head as he watches his sister. “She was young enough to forget it, but there were times we could barely afford the water bill, let alone get a life-sized ice sculpture of a fucking insect.”

Clarke looks at the giant ice sculpture, unconsciously running her thumb over the plastic ring adorning her middle finger. She found it in her room earlier today, and decided to put it on, for nostalgia’s sake. “Isn’t that good?” She bites her lip, hoping he doesn’t take offense to it. “I mean, this is what you wanted for her, right? For her life to be better than yours.”

“My life hasn’t been all that shitty in the end,” he admits, genuine, even a bit bashful. “I mean — it used to be. But then I came here and—” He licks his lips, taking a quick sip of his drink as he averts his brown eyes. “Things started to look up for me.”

If only he realized he wasn’t lucky to be taken in by Theo, but instead Theo was lucky he ended up with someone as great, and loyal, intelligent, and sensitive, someone as dependable as Bellamy. He makes everything better just being there.

“And they’ll continue to look up,” Clarke promises, hooking her arm through his and briefly resting her cheek against his shoulder. If there’s anything she trusts, it’s that Bellamy Blake deserves good things and the universe will make that happen for him.

His eyes clear a little as he looks down at her, smiling softly. “You look nice, by the way.”

“I know,” she agrees, downing half of her cocktail as she gives him a once-over. The sleeves of his button-up pushed up, his unfairly broad shoulders, his less messy than usual curls that seem to have gotten a recent trim. “You look hot.”

Bellamy laughs, warm and affectionate and for the first time it hits her she’s going to be homeless, has been homeless for a very long time. That perhaps the thought of that should strike her with more fear, yet instead she feels calmer than she has in a while. “Okay, if I knew we were going to say what we really think I would’ve come up with something better than ‘nice’.”

“There’s still time,” she says, coy, then nods to the make-shift dance floor as the song changes to something slower that sounds a lot like James Bay. She takes a step forward, holding out her hand as she places her near empty drink on a nearby folding bar table. “Wanna dance?”

He looks reluctant for only a second, then slams back the rest of his drink, taking her hand in his as he lets her tug him along towards the illuminated disco floor panels that are mostly occupied by a bunch of frantically jumping teenagers and a few stray work friends from Theo side-stepping to the beat. 

Bellamy’s hand is warm in hers, his other splayed across her waist as they slowly sway to the music. “It’s kind of sickenly, huh? How in love Wells is?” He comments conversationally, probably referring to the fact Wells ditched them to go on a cruise with Delilah and her parents. 

Her mouth twitches with a smile. “I always thought he’d be the first to settle down.”

He gives her a curious look. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Clarke presses. It’s always been obvious to her, suspects it’s half the reason why Wells even clung into the thought of loving her in the first place. Half his life was already built around her. “He’s always wanted the whole live-laugh-love relationship.”

He makes a considerate hum, spinning her around once. Her back bumps into his chest briefly, and then she’s facing him again, a flush high on her cheeks.

“What?” She urges him on.

“I don’t know. I always figured—” Bellamy shakes his head, stubborn. “It’s stupid.”

A grin curves onto her pink mouth. “Humour me.”

“I assumed that because—” He clears his throat, and his gaze dips down to a spot on her shoulder, brows pinching together faintly. “He wouldn’t be able to get over you.”

She raises her eyebrows, skeptical. “He’s literally engaged. I’m not that special.”

One or two lines of the song pass before he unclenches his jaw, dragging his dark, heavy gaze up to hers, “Maybe we aren’t all as lucky as him.”

Her fingers tighten around his shoulder as she swallows hard, her pulse sent racing. _Let’s be hopeful, don’t get broken and stay caught up in the moment_. Her throat feels dry, scratchy, when she speaks, “What do you mean?” She’s never needed someone to spell anything out as much as in this moment.

Bellamy licks his lips, his thumb tenderly running over the back of her hand, the ghost of a touch — careful, guarded. “You’re special to me, princess.”

Special. Isn’t that what she thinks of him? What she’s always thought of him? That that’s the reason she never truly got over him? _I wanna go where the lights burn low and you’re only mine._ Her heart is pounding loudly, blood rushing in her ears and drowning out everything else that isn’t him. “What about Roma?”

He scoffs, although there’s not much heat to it. “We broke up last year.”

It’s been months, then. Her head spins. “Last year?”

His lips purse, as if the memory is actually hazy. “It was sometime before your birthday, I think.”

“How did I not know?” Clarke lifts her hand off his shoulder to punch him in the chest, then immediately softens. No matter how much of a nightmare the thought of them together was to her, Roma was important to him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he laughs, amused, and it must be true. He hasn’t been pulling away from her, from them, or moping around, carrying any grudges that she knows of. “It was never going to be forever. I loved her, but…” Bellamy trails off, and his words linger there in the lack of space between them.

_Loved her, but._ Isn’t that what always happens? His smile is cute and he’s charming, _but._ Her hands are soft and small, _but_. I like her, so much, _but._ There’s always a ‘but’, linking one clause to the one that reminds her they’re not him. That she already had the best there ever was, her partner, and she lost out on him.

“All her pictures are still up on your Instagram. I didn’t—” She’s shaking her head with disbelief, cutting herself off. She feels like she is short-circuiting. They never talk about their respective girl- and boyfriends. It’s just not something they do, even if they have tried to be more normal about it. It’s not a subject she’d like to ask him about either, she just ignored it most of the time, which is maybe why she never noticed he stopped mentioning her because that never happened in the first place. She would’ve liked to have been there for him though. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“You spend a lot of time looking at my Instagram?” He’s smirking, boyish, a challenge hiding in his warm brown eyes, which must mean he really is alright. The song ends.

Clarke opts out, just because. There’s a lot left to unpack, and mostly just wants to gloat undisturbed for a little while that his girlfriend is out of the picture. Who knows how long it’ll last this time around. Part of her feels bad, which is why she makes the suggestion in the first place, “It’s been a while since I was day drunk.”

His brow arches with interest. “Is that a proposal?”

“Try and keep up,” she challenges, dropping her hand from his as she sends him another look over her shoulder on the way to the open bar. By the time he’s at her side, he’s ordered them both a signature Octavia cocktail that comes in a tall glass with her name on it in black scripture. It’s something along the lines of a blackberry whiskey lemonade — Clarke didn’t study the menu that well — that they also serve virgin for all the underage kids. 

“This tastes like shit,” Bellamy hisses, grimacing after he’s taken a sip.

“Yeah, well, I told them to go light on the blackberry lemonade.”

“Has college turned you into a functioning alcoholic?”

“Just tired of being around you.”

He barks out a laugh. “You don’t look tired.”

“No, I look nice,” Clarke returns, pointed.

“You look more than nice, pretty girl,” he confesses darkly, and even he temporarily looks taken aback by his own forwardness, as if he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing to her. That fucking nickname.

Two can play that game, even if it’s dangerous. She honestly shouldn’t be _this_ elated he got rid of his girlfriend. It makes her a bad friend, probably, and it’s made her even more reckless with this thing between them. “Mhm, I’m not sure I’m convinced.”

“As someone who’s been told he’s hot before—”

She groans. “Is it too late for takebacks?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t gotten any better at flirting.”

He’s smirking, one of those smug, annoying ones. “Then why are you blushing?”

“It’s the whiskey.”

Bellamy hums skeptically, changing the subject to something safer. “So what are you doing after your mom leaves for DC?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe medical school.” The longer she doesn’t sign up, the more she starts questioning if that’s even something she ever wanted in the first place and she’s slowly starting to remember why she never stops moving. Her head doesn’t do well in the quiet. “You?”

“I’m looking into houses in the neighbourhood.” He looks a bit sheepish. “Well, not this neighbourhood, obviously, since it’s out of my price range, but somewhere near Arkadia.”

It takes her a second. _Arkadia Middle School._ He’d off-handedly mentioned applying for a job there a while ago, already convinced they would never go for a guy fresh from college, but when he didn’t mention it again she figured they’d went with someone with some more experience. “No way.” Her eyes widen, mouth curving into an excited smile. “They hired you?”

“Yeah.” He rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. “Just got the news this morning.”

He’s so dumb.

“Congrats, you ass,” Clarke exclaims, careful with her drink as she leans up to hug him, one arm snaking around his neck as his free hand comes up on the small of her back, warm and big and sending a stupid jolt up her spine. She ends up standing just a little closer to him when she pulls away. “Do they know?”

“Nah, I figured I would let Octavia have her day.” He shrugs, a casual lift of his shoulders, stuffing his hand into the pocket of his slacks. “It’s a big deal, high school graduation.”

Theirs wasn’t. Not like this anyway, with the extravagant party and the dramatic touch-and-go graduation. Clarke was still naive back then, hopeful for the possibilities of the future, instead of longing for everything she had in the past. More often than not, she still finds herself stuck there, because it’s where they’ll always be happy, together, protected. Nothing can get to them there, in her memories.

“So is getting your first real job,” she argues, patting his chest affectionately. Delight courses through her veins on behalf of him. He’s going to do great. “I’m proud of you.”

The tips of his ears turn a darker shade of red and he quickly looks away, promptly changing the subject after he takes another hasty gulp of his drink. “Any medical schools on your mind?”

“Why? Is your separation anxiety acting up already?” She teases lightheartedly, leaning into him a little, heat radiating off his chest.

Bellamy’s answer is more serious than she’d expected, and it throws her off. Perhaps it’s just his anxieties getting the best of him, digging up this old hurt from Roma. She’s not stupid. She knows it’s not really about _her._ He never was the best at being alone and she’s easy, to him at least, and familiar, a new safety net. “I never want to be away from you, princess.”

She shifts her head to blink up at him. “You’re laying it on really thick today.”

“Must be the whiskey,” he challenges, hiding his smirk behind his glass.

Clarke should put a stop to this, she should. It took them so long to get back to a place of common cordiality, to get back to them, and even if it’s just innocent harmless flirting, something that’s always been part of his MO, it’s a thin line they’re treading. She can’t be his rebound, or his second choice. Can’t be a one time thing and lose him again. None of it’s worth the risk—no matter how good he looks in this shirt, how warm he feels and nice he smells, how turned on she gets by just one touch or gaze, how easy it would be.

She should. But it’s been a while since he’s looked at her like this, watching her every move, hanging on to every word falling from her lips, hungry for whatever she’s capable of giving him, and then the song switches to something upbeat, and Clarke’s just so fucking weak when it comes to him. She doesn’t _want_ it to stop, not yet, so she’s finding ways she can drag it out instead. “Wanna go dance and embarrass the shit out of Octavia?”

He holds up his hand for the bartender, getting them two new cocktails. “It’s basically my duty as her big brother.”

She quickly downs the rest of her current drink with a wince, deserting it on top of the counter. It’s pure whiskey at this point. “Is it your duty as my best friend to get me drunk?”

“Hey,” Bellamy opposes, without much heat, leaving a wet ring on the mahogany of the bar as he picks up his new glass, tipping the bartender generously. “It was your idea to get day drunk.”

Clarke pulls him back towards the dancefloor without any more protests. The song is happy and fast-tempo, they’ve brought out the multi-colored laser beams and purple smoke machines now, and the two of them slowly loosen up as they dance and drink and gladly embarrass the living shit out of his sister. She leans closer, pressing up on her tiptoes so he can hear her above the music, already half-laughing at the memory. “Remember that time in middle school when Wells told our sex ed teacher she was being inappropriate?”

He’s laughing too, a warm sound rumbling from deep in his chest, and it sets her skin on fire. “And now he’s getting married. Crazy, right?” Bellamy takes her hand and holds it above her head so she can twirl around while continuing to drink, because for some reason drinking is a very important part of this whole equation, and then doesn’t let go when she ends up back on her previous spot, tightening his fingers around hers. “Remember when that guy from our basketball team had a crush on him?” Clarke squints at him, trying to remember, so he elaborates, “He went to that horrible Glow-in-the-dark dance with him because he didn’t know how to say ‘no.”

She lights up. “And then he thought we wouldn’t notice—”

Bellamy is grinning with amusement. “All the neon-green over his mouth.”

“Mortifying.” She actually shudders. “I think in the end he actually implied that guy was a better kisser than me.” 

“You were what? Ten?” She nods. “You were ten at the time, I think you’ve probably improved since then.”

“Think?” Clarke presses, because she can’t not. She has an ego to protect her.

He makes a good argument, “I wasn’t your first kiss, so I don’t have anything to compare it to.” He was a lot of her other firsts, though.

Rolling her eyes, she briefly digs her nails into the back of his hand. “Just admit I’m the best kisser ever.”

“Ever?” He prompts, questioningly, as if it’s open for discussion.

“Ever,” she echoes, _confidently_. He can pretend all he wants. He can get over her within days, and have boring standard five-minute penis-in-vagina sex with the same girl for years, and assure everyone for the rest of his life that all he thinks are platonic thoughts when it comes to Clarke, but she knows and he knows that she was the only one who could make him feel as good as she did. Probably still can.

“Top three definitely.”

“I won’t take offense to that since you probably kiss your mirror image before bed every night.”

“Fine,” he grunts, nonchalantly. “Nobody compares to you, Clarke.” He’s joking, but it hits her in the chest like a tonne of bricks, knocking the air straight from her lungs. He can’t keep saying things like that.

Naturally, she changes the subject, leaning closer to him so she can take her straw into her mouth, from where the drink’s dangling from her wrist thrown over his shoulder, take a noisy sip. She gets a whiff of his rich cologne and what can’t be anything else but his axe body spray. “We’re acting like he’s got a death sentence, you know.”

Bellamy shrugs, looking at something over her shoulder. “Depends.”

She watches him thoughtfully. The freckles splattered across the bridge of his nose, the dark flush on his sharp cheekbones, the scar above his lip he got playing Lily Pads with his sister when he was ten. “On what?”

“If she’s the one he wants to marry.”

“Obviously,” Clarke argues, frowning up at him. It couldn’t be more clear Wells is gone on this girl. “He’s in Cabo with her parents right now. You know he hates hot weather.”

The conversation moves over to Mexico, and then somehow the Aztecs, and then they’re imagining their dream trip which gets more outrageously ridiculous with every suggestion the other adds until they settle on ‘ _a planet that’s actually a moon with two suns and there’s no one else except for a singular dog that has to be named after a famous painter and there’s a palace so she can be a princess and the sky is green because green is pretty’._ After a few more drinks they switch to virgin cocktails and soda because embarrassing his sister is fun but vomiting all over yourself at the ripe age of twenty-one is leaning more towards pathetic, and they do a very bad rendition of the electric slide that includes a lasso and a lot of mostly involuntarily floor touching while Octavia glares at them. They eventually steal a full platter of shrimp tartlets and the fancy version of pigs in a blanket and pesto pinwheels and scarf them down at a table in the corner while tipsily playing superlatives with his sister’s friends ranging from ‘ _most likely to be on Catfish_ ’ to ‘ _most likely to be in jail before thirty'_. Clarke’s sweaty from the sticky weather, and a little nauseous from drinking on an empty stomach and then trying to counteract that by eating her weight in seafood, but it’s fun and she feels light and home and _happy_. She feels hopeful, that for once, things might not have to be so complicated.

The sun is starting to set in the sky, covering the backyard in an orange-pink hue, and the party’s slowly dwindling down. Octavia already left with her friends to have a big celebratory dinner at a probably way too expensive restaurant, but they all knew that was the risk of giving her a black card for her sixteenth birthday. When Clarke shifts her head to look at Bellamy, he’s already looking at her. Her pulse trips. The rough edge to his voice doesn’t help. “You wanna come up to my room?”

She smiles, because she can’t not smile. “It’s probably not a good idea.”

“Probably not,” he agrees, and because her head’s swimming and she barely has time to come up with any rational reasons why not, it really isn’t that complicated at all. It might be the easiest thing she’s ever done.

Clarke licks her lips and then juts her chin at the house. “Lead the way.”

They stumble up the stairs, trying but desperately failing to be quiet, and his hands are on the zipper on the back of her dress the minute the door slams shut behind them. “Fuck, it’s stuck,” Bellamy groans a little as she presses her ass back into him, self-satisfied satisfaction flaring through her when she feels he’s already half-hard. It _is_ still there, even after all this time, this nameless and irresistible pull of attraction between them.

Her brain keeps chanting _this is a bad idea_ , that this can only end one way, and yet she can’t help it. She’s powerless when it comes to him. Her body is silencing the voice in her head, blood rushing to her ears to drown it out. She aches with it. Clarke tells herself it’s okay, that it’s just lust, just convenience, just build-up tension they’re getting rid of because it’s familiar and easy and old habits die hard. She tells herself this won’t undo years of hard work to get back to normal, it won’t.

It won’t.

“Just rip it,” she snaps, desperate and breathy as he combs her hair off her neck to start pressing kisses down her bare skin, warm lips lingering in between her shoulder blades as he does what she says, roughly pulling down on the material until it makes an angry noise. 

Clarke starts pulling the tied-straps down her arms while his arm snakes around her waist, pulling up the skirt of her dress to flatten his palm over her belly. He pets impatiently at her cunt, the material of her thong more than damp. Two of his fingers press down over her clit before pushing aside her underwear to test out just how wet she is. Her head falls back against his firm chest and her hand flies out to steady herself against his dresser, her knees threatening to give out.

She only got one arm out of her dress, the material halfway pooling at her waist to reveal the beckoning swell of her breast covered by pretty black lace. The lack of undress doesn’t stop him, his free hand coming up to grip it tightly, sending a fresh surge of need to her centre as his thumb flicks over her hardened nipple through her bra. His other fingers curl into her heat, groaning at the amount of slick he’s met with. “God, baby. You still feel so good.”

_Baby_. How she’s longed to hear that sound from his lips again, ached for it, lived for it. Clarke bites down on her lip hard enough to draw blood as his fingers push in deeper, her hips surging up against his hand as her other fingers fly up to fist his curls. Her legs give out just a little, and his arm tightens around her waist, giving her nipple another mean pinch that makes her whole body jerk back against him. She can practically feel his smug smirk of satisfaction against the side of her face, and she’s so far gone, so focused on his fingers moving in and out of her, of the obscene sounds it’s making, of how good it feels to have him inside of her again, she can’t even make herself care. 

A wave of heat flows through her as he finds that special spot with a curl of his fingers, and Clarke risks a look down at where his big hand is disappearing beneath black lace, so hot, and it’s only a few pumps of his fingers before she’s unraveling against him, moaning his name as her fingernails bite into the back of his head. 

She comes back to the real world when Bellamy pulls his fingers from her, and knowing how turned on he always got by it, she catches his hand and brings it to her mouth, sucking his fingers clean of her juices with a filthy loud pop. He has this dazed look on his face when she turns around to face him, and when she starts to move to drag the other strap of her dress down, his still spit-slick hand is coming up to palm her neck, tugging her forward so he can crush his mouth to hers. The force of it is near brutal, hot and hard and needy, telling her even he is teetering on the edge of his control.

He leads her to the bed with his eyes closed, softly guiding her to sit down on the mattress while his mouth is still attached to hers, desperate to taste her, to lick in to her, to be part of her again. Bellamy finally pulls back when she manages to unclasp her bra, tossing it aside on the floor somewhere by his neat desk. Dark, greedy eyes take her in eagerly.

“How do you look even better than before?” He groans, his forehead dropping down to her collarbone. It thrills her a little, that even after all these years, after all that’s gone down between them, he still never stopped thinking about her. That at least part of her haunted him like he’s been haunting her.

Clarke starts working on the buttons of his shirt instead of troubling herself with answering him while he kisses and sucks at her throat and chest lazily, his tongue teasing along the sensitive skin covering her rapidly fluttering pulse point, teeth nipping at the sharp jut of her clavicle as his blunt fingernails leave goosebumps over her chest in their wake, scraping across the swell of her breasts, digging into the sides of the pink buds peaking out.

“Come on,” she whines, trying to push the material over his shoulders despite the fact he’s not being very helpful, seems content torturing her with his hands and mouth for however long he wants. She doesn’t even care how pathetically desperate she sounds. “Get naked already.”

Finally, he takes the hint, shrugging off his shirt while kicking off his shoes before lifting his hips off the bed to shuck his pants. Her dark blue eyes linger on the bulge in his boxers, her cunt clenching around nothing in anticipation. It’s been way too fucking long. His hand slides on top of her thigh, ducking his head to peck her mouth until she’s lifting her chin to meet him for a more intent press of their lips. She’s missed this most of all, she thinks, _kissing_ him.

“You ever think about me?” Bellamy asks then, his voice rough, sounding small and unsure all of a sudden as his thumb swipes absent windscreen-sweeper motions over the soft skin of her inner thigh. 

For a second, she grows tense, but then she figures there’s no need in lying. They ended up here, like always. He called her baby, had his fingers inside of her, made her come, maybe it’s all made her too soft, made her lower her walls more than she should’ve, but she doesn’t want to keep things from him anymore. 

“I used to dream about this,” she admits, and the two of them sitting here half-naked, it reminds her a lot of the first time they did this. It’s a strange kind of déjà vu, heightening everything. 

He makes an affirmative noise, nosing at the curve of her shoulder, fingers trailing down the opposite arm. It’s nearly too much.

Dread unconsciously creeps into her mind and her throat works hard to swallow. “What about you?”

“What about me?” He tries to hide his smirk as he drags his face back up, but it’s way too obvious. “Did I ever think about you when I was fucking Roma in missionary—”

Her cheeks heat at the memory. “Go fuck yourself.”

Bellamy sobers up rather quickly, pressing closer to her like she might leave if he doesn’t. “I’d rather fuck you.”

“Shut up already, then,” Clarke orders, pushing him back on the bed with a hand on his chest until he’s lying down flat while she starts to crawl towards him. “I’m going to be on top.”

He lifts his hips to push his boxers down and _yeah_ , it’s definitely even better than she remembered. “No complaints here.”

“In that case,” she starts to threaten emptily, as if riding him isn’t her absolute favorite activity in the world, but then he’s banding an arm around her back and kissing her as he hoists them higher up onto his mattress. She gets rid of her panties and then settles a knee on each side of his hips, rubbing her drenched slit up and down his length a few times. He’s grunting softly, one arm slung over his eyes that are squeezed shut tightly, the other hand digging into her hip, and she’s enjoying the fuck out of it — having him completely at her mercy.

“Condom?” Bellamy mutters after a few times, strained. 

“I’m clean.” She rolls her hips again, slow, right where he’s throbbing up flat against his abdomen. A hiss passes her lips when his head catches on her clit, a jolt of pleasure traveling up her spine. Since it’s taking him so long, she prompts, impatient and breathing heavy, “You?”

He makes somewhat of an affirmative hum, so Clarke takes him in her delicate grip, running her thumb over the glistening head to swipe at the pre-come already gathered there. She lifts it to mouth, sucking the salty, heady taste off her thumb as she looks down at him. His gaze is dark and heavy on hers, and he holds it even as she positions him at her entrance, slowly easing him into her welcoming heat.

They’re groaning in unison, her teeth sliding over her bottom lip as she adjusts to the familiar stretch, her eyes glazing over with pleasure as her hands steady themselves on his chest. She gives it a moment before sliding down further, as far as she can go, until they’re as close they can humanly get. There’s a moment of charged silence as they get used to each other again before she starts moving against him, first rocking and pressing and then drawing up before returning. It’s slow at first, and then her hands anchor her body on his chins so the angle is even more delicious, and it turns faster then, and faster, until she’s slamming onto him, his hips meeting her eagerly. 

Clarke tosses her head back, moaning his name, and then his thumbs are digging into her hip bones meanly. “Look at me, Clarke. I want you to look at me,” he grumbles, darkly, and there’s something about his voice that makes her obey, no matter how much energy it costs her to drag her head back up, to keep her half-lidded eyes from fluttering close.

“Bell,” she groans, definitely complaining and perhaps nearly sobbing. She’s exhausted and frustrated and she feels so good, so full, she just wants to _come_.

One of his hands palms her breast roughly, rolling the hardened bud between his thumb and forefinger roughly. “Just look at me.” There’s a lingering promise there, of something good.

Her thighs burn, and sweat trails down her temple, but then his thumb presses over her clit and she can’t physically look away from him in the most intense of ways and then, just like that, gazes locked, her out-of-practice cunt overworked and full to the brim, a small orgasm washes over at her, warm and soft and enough to make her go boneless for a moment. His hands move to cup her ass, holding her up as he moves himself to sit up against his headboard. 

Bellamy occupies himself with licking and sucking at the sensitive flesh of her breast as she catches her breath, and as soon as she gives him even the smallest inclination she has by letting her eyes flutter open, he’s lowering her on her back into the mattress. He slips out of her in the process, earning himself a desperate whine from her lips. 

“Fuck me, Bellamy,” she demands, begs, fingernails digging into his forearms as he pushes into her slowly. Her eyelids flutter but she doesn’t drop his gaze, not even when his flash black as he pushes home, stretching her out, filling her up, right to the hilt like no one else can.

He seems to share her thoughts, because soon he’s moving slowly, pulling out and pushing back in, and he’s rambling, “You feel so good, baby. No one else feels as good as you.”

His hips start to move faster, harder, complying exactly with what she craves, and she clutches him tighter to her, and God, Clarke’s not even sure if she’s still in love with him, or if she’s just in love with the idea of him, but she’s never wanted— _needed_ anyone as much as she needs him. She’s not even sure she has another one left in her, but then her eyes lose focus and her mouth drops open in a silent ‘o’ as she comes again, Bellamy’s hips slamming into her once, then twice, holding himself there for a beat each time, rocking himself against her as he spills inside of her, unable to withstand the tightening of her cunt around him. 

He thumbs at her clit as he slides out, just to see her twitch, and then collapses beside her. Blindly, she pinches his nipple in retaliation, to which he only yelps quietly, more out of surprise than actual pain, before dissolving into soft laughter. 

Bellamy slides his arm over her back and settles at her side. Clarke palms the side of his neck then, eyes still closed, breathing hard. He leans forward to kiss her nose, then brush his against hers, and she’s too far gone to say anything of it as they pull themselves together. This can’t be what he wants it to be, but she’s still too buzzed on alcohol to translate those thoughts, and she’s too exhausted from fucking him to recognize how truly dangerous the warmth blooming in the middle of her chest is.

“What did we do?” She mumbles, defeated, frowning at his jaw as she runs her thumb over the sharp bone, exhaustion settling in heavily. All of her anxieties that were numbed down by the alcohol in her bloodstream, were pushed aside as she chased the high of human touch, long forgotten because of the haze of his familiar proximity, come slamming back into her all at once.

He blinks at her, dazed and sleepy and confused, adjusting his head so he can lean close enough to kiss her. Bellamy seems to think the answer is much less complicated than her. “You’re my girl, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Clarke confesses after a beat, hoarse, a hollow ache starting to settle behind her ribs. A truth so simple, and yet it doesn’t change anything. “Always.”

She wakes up in the morning with her hand intertwined with his, his blankets half draped over them and her cheek pressed to the sticky skin of his freckled shoulder. Her head pounds with a nasty hang-over, her heart with anxiety as last night comes flooding back in in fast flashes. His hand on her waist as they danced, their fingers brushing as he handed her another drink, his consuming lips on hers, his cock sliding inside of her like it never left, _no one else feels as good as you_ , him nosing her cheek.

_Fuck_. She swallows back the sick stuck in the back of her throat. What if Octavia found them like this? She can’t be the reason his family falls apart again. She can’t be the cause of another rift between them and Wells. She can’t have him look at her the way he did that night Wells found out. Can’t have him pick them over her. End up alone, and left behind. Not again. She can’t bear it. 

Clarke quickly grabs her clothes, curses herself when she can’t find her underwear, and then goes home. Home, for however long she still gets to call it that. The majority of her stuff is in boxes by now, and she’s been mostly living out of her suitcase all summer, so it doesn’t take her long to pack everything up. 

On the way to the airport, she texts Josie. 

┇

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please let me know what you think. heavy on the please. im desperate for validation.

**Author's Note:**

> feed my superiority complex and leave a comment


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